यान्ति देवव्रता देवान्पितॄन्यान्ति पितृव्रताः ।भूतानि यान्ति भूतेज्या यान्ति मद्याजिनोऽपि माम्॥
yānti deva-vratā devān pitṝīn yānti pitṛ-vratāḥbhūtāni yānti bhūtejyā yānti mad-yājino ’pi mām
Word by word
The verse says
Those who are vowed to the gods go to the gods. Those vowed to the ancestors go to the ancestors. Those who sacrifice to the spirits go to the spirits. And those who sacrifice to me come to me.
In plain words
Four clauses, all the same shape.
There is no punishment anywhere in the line, and no reward either.
You arrive where you were facing. That is the whole of it.
Where you've felt this · in relationships
Your friend joined a new office four years ago. He now uses phrases he would once have laughed at, finds the same things funny as the people there, and worries about the same things on a Sunday night. Nobody set out to make him into that. Attention is not a neutral activity. It was slowly building something the whole time.
Going deeper
Becoming what you attend to is stated here as a law rather than a warning, and the flatness of the line is the point.
Four destinations, four groups, one mechanism. Nothing suggests that the first three are being punished for choosing badly. They arrive exactly where they were headed, which is what happens to everybody.
That is why the chapter can be so relaxed about other people's worship and still make a recommendation. There is no gate and no judgement. There is only the fact that attention has a direction, and that over a long enough time it delivers you somewhere.
The unnerving part is that this runs whether or not anybody is thinking about religion. Whatever has had your attention for the last ten years has been doing this to you the entire time, and it did not need your consent.