To say to a person: "I do not care for you, because you have been thoughtless", that is not the right kind of indifference, that is not the indifference that mystics relate as being vairagia. The mystical indifference is that a soul retains sympathy and love even at the thoughtlessness of a person, and expresses it as forgiveness.

In the Bible we read the words of Christ: "Turn the other side of your face if a person has struck you on one side."

What else is this than the lesson of indifference? How can a sensitive person, a person of feeling, a spiritual, tenderhearted person live in this world, if he is not indifferent? He cannot live here one moment! There is only this one thing that protects him from the continual jarring influences that come from all sides.

Question: Why not call it detachment.
Answer: Detachment is not really the right word.

We cannot be detached, we are never detached. Life is one and nothing can separate it. Detachment is only an illusionary aspect of life. There is no such thing as detachment in truth. How can there be detachment when life is one!

Often in order to make it clearer I have said: "Indifference and independence": two meanings of that one word vairagia. Indifference alone explains it only by half.