आसुरीं योनिमापन्ना मूढा जन्मनि जन्मनि ।मामप्राप्यैव कौन्तेय ततो यान्त्यधमां गतिम्॥
āsurīṃ yonim āpannā mūḍhā janmani janmanimām aprāpyaiva kaunteya tato yānty adhamāṃ gatim
Word by word
The verse says
Falling into such births one life after another, fooled, never reaching me, they go lower still, Arjuna.
In plain words
The second half of the hard passage, and then it stops. This is the last of it.
What is described is a slope, not a sentence passed. Each life of that kind makes the next one of that kind more likely.
And the thing missing from it is named exactly: mām aprāpya - not reaching me. Not punished. Not reaching.
Where you've felt this · in community
Two families on the same lane stopped speaking about a boundary wall before either of the present generations was born. Nobody now alive knows exactly what was said. The children of both houses are polite to each other at school and awkward on the lane. There is no quarrel any more. There is only the shape a quarrel left behind, handed down by people who did not make it.
Going deeper
A slope is being described rather than a sentence handed down, and reading it as the second thing is what makes this passage dangerous.
The mechanism is given plainly. That kind of birth, then that kind again, each one making the next more likely. Nothing in it requires an outside punisher. A hard person becomes harder because hardness keeps working, right up until it does not.
The phrase that matters most is the quiet one: not reaching me. The loss being described is not torture. It is absence. Whatever this book has been pointing at for fifteen chapters simply never arrives, and the person never learns what did not arrive, which is the whole of the tragedy.
A way out follows immediately, and it is open to anybody at all. Nobody is left standing at the bottom of this passage without being shown the stairs.