Ashtavakra Gita

I have found the vast ocean of my own self, in which the universe rises like a small bubble and disappears again without a trace

The scale of the metaphor is the point — an ocean doesn't need the bubble to complete it, and neither does the self need the universe it appears to contain.

Janaka reaches for one of the text's largest images to describe what he has found: not a private inner peace but something vast enough to be called an ocean, within which the entire universe rises and vanishes again the way a bubble does on the surface of the sea. The comparison carries a specific implication — a bubble's appearance and disappearance changes nothing about the ocean's depth or extent, just as the universe's arising and passing changes nothing about the self Janaka is describing. This inverts the ordinary assumption that the self is a small, contained thing located somewhere within a much larger universe; here the self is the containing reality, and the universe is the smaller, temporary phenomenon inside it. It's among the most quoted images in the Ashtavakra Gita precisely because of that scale reversal.

Ashtavakra Gita