RELINQUISH is the voluntary surrender of desire, attachment, and ultimately the psychological demand that existence conform to one's preferences. The Pilgrims believe desire creates suffering because wanting one state of reality over another makes the mind vulnerable to frustration, deprivation, grief, fear, and loss. Liberation therefore comes through progressively accepting existence without requiring particular outcomes from it.

       Relinquishment must be chosen. Something stolen, destroyed, or involuntarily lost has not been relinquished; autonomy is essential because the spiritual transformation lies in willingly surrendering what one could otherwise attempt to retain. A Pilgrim may relinquish something already meaningless, but surrendering something still deeply desired represents a more difficult and potentially more transformative act.

       The Pilgrimage therefore progresses beyond material poverty. Possessions are only early attachments. Advanced Pilgrims relinquish attachment to outcomes, identities, relationships, desires, and eventually even continued animated existence. Different stages consequently produce different degrees of care: an early Pilgrim may desperately intervene to prevent another's suffering; an advanced Pilgrim may intervene while accepting either outcome; an extreme Pilgrim may possess so little preference that intervention itself no longer arises.

       The endpoint is not simply having nothing. It is reaching a condition in which nothing possesses psychological authority over the Self—until, at the furthest conceivable extreme, there may be no remaining desire even to preserve the Self.