समं पश्यन्हि सर्वत्र समवस्थितमीश्वरम्।न हिनस्त्यात्मनाऽऽत्मानं ततो याति परां गतिम्॥
samaṃ paśyan hi sarvatra samavasthitam īśvaramna hinasty ātmanātmānaṃ tato yāti parāṃ gatim
Word by word
The verse says
Seeing the lord equally present everywhere, he does not injure himself by himself. And so he reaches the highest.
In plain words
Na hinasty ātmanātmānam — he does not harm himself by himself.
That is an unexpected consequence. You would expect the sentence to be about not harming others.
It says the damage of not seeing this falls on the one not seeing.
Where you've felt this · in relationships
Your colleague has decided the man across the office is against him. He spends two years reading every email twice. The man across the office, who is mildly indifferent to him, spends those two years untroubled. Only one of them lost any evenings.
Going deeper
Locating the damage in the person who fails to see is a shift of emphasis worth sitting with.
The moral argument against treating people unequally is about them. This verse makes a different claim: the one who does not see harms himself, by himself. Nobody else is required for the injury.
The doubled word is deliberate — by the self, the self. There is no external agent in the sentence at all.
Anyone who has carried a grudge can check this. The person you cannot see fairly is usually unaffected, often unaware, and the cost is entirely on your side of the arrangement. The verse is not saying that makes it harmless to them. It is saying that even on purely selfish terms the arithmetic does not work, which is sometimes the argument that lands when the moral one has not.