न तदस्ति पृथिव्यां वा दिवि देवेषु वा पुनः ।सत्त्वं प्रकृतिजैर्मुक्तं यदेभिः स्यात्त्रिभिर्गुणैः॥
na tad asti pṛthivyāṃ vā divi deveṣu vā punaḥsattvaṃ prakṛti-jair muktaṃ yad ebhiḥ syāt tribhir guṇaiḥ
Word by word
The verse says
There is no being anywhere, on earth or among the bright powers in the sky, that is free of these three strands born of nature.
In plain words
A sweeping line to close the sorting, and it includes everybody.
No creature on earth. Not even the gods. Nothing in existence stands outside the three strands.
Which means the three kinds he has been describing are not a classification of other people. They are the material everything is made from, including whoever is reading.
Where you've felt this · in community
You are waiting two hours at a railway station. You watch the man at the ticket counter, the woman sweeping the platform, the tea seller, and a family with too much luggage. Each of them is kind at some point. Each is short with somebody at some point. Each drifts off somewhere else. Nobody there is one thing. The roles differ enormously. The range does not.
Going deeper
Universality is the point of this line, and it lands differently depending on how the last twenty verses have been read.
If you have been using the three strands as a sorting system for other people, this takes the system away. There is no grade of being, anywhere in the described universe, that sits outside the material. The categories do not divide the population into kinds.
What they divide is moments. You have been clear this morning and heavy by four o'clock, and the proportions shift over a life. Chapter 14 said the three are always all present and that one rises by pressing the others down, which is a description of weather rather than of character.
So the honest use of everything in this chapter is diagnostic and temporary. Not what kind of person am I, which has no stable answer, but what is running right now, which does.