Vairagya — often translated as detachment, dispassion, or non-attachment — is one of the Gita's central psychological disciplines. It is easy to misunderstand. Krishna is not asking Arjuna to become cold, indifferent, or withdrawn. He is asking him to act fully while remaining inwardly free from the tyranny of craving and aversion.
The distinction matters. Attachment (raga) and aversion (dvesha) are the twin engines of samsara — the same force in opposite directions. To crave one outcome and dread another is to be bound to the wheel, because both bind us to the fluctuations of fortune. Vairagya is the interior state in which action is performed without either the greedy pull of one outcome or the fearful push away from another. The result is not passivity but freedom to act.
The Gita develops this teaching most powerfully in Chapter 2 (verses 55-72, the portrait of the sthita-prajna), Chapter 6 (the practice of the still mind), and Chapter 12 (the qualities of the devotee). The famous chain of 2.62-63 — from contemplation to attachment to desire to anger to delusion to ruin — is the negative case; the sthita-prajna verses are its positive resolution.
Read these verses as a program of interior training. They describe a state that must be practised, not just intellectually accepted — a state in which one can lose without collapse, receive without inflation, and act without needing to control the outcome.