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Hope and fear are both betrayers. The impotent weapons of these people who think they wield absolute power over me.

The means intended to impose this are humiliation, pain and interrogation.

I don’t need hope any more and pain doesn’t last for ever.

Being a naturally compassionate person I would like to help my torturers but they are not in a situation which would allow them to listen. Torturers will only hear what they want to hear – and that has nothing to do with their enlightenment. It’s about rewards for success offered by their employers; employment, promotion and a wage.

Anything torturers say or do will be drawn from their upbringing, culture, training and the anguish and pain these cause them. That they have elected to become torturers means I’m being dealt with by people unable to understand much yet.

However, if I look at their actions through a purely behavioural paradigm I can make predictions – not that any are going to be enjoyable for me.

I’m aware the only end to this is my death. That’s fine. Everyone dies. Dying of prolonged torture is very rare. I’m one of the few unlucky ones.

Speaking to these people or answering their questions will only prolong my agony. Answers would encourage them to hope for success. Success for my torturers will be my saying what they want to hear.

Anticipated failure will present itself in their behaviour through a grief process which will be muddled but generally follow the pattern of denial to acceptance.

If they fail I die. If they succeed I die too – only more slowly as they push and push to increase or refine their success.

If I reward them with success they will gain confidence and believe they can be rewarded again by behaving like this to someone else. I think they will anyway, given their current enthusiasm. However, failure will raise doubt in their minds. This may enable them to move on in life and grow a little as humans. Possibly I’ll save someone else from this treatment in future. But failure could make the torturers worse as their behaviour goes through an extinction burst. Who knows?

My crime, as they would have it, is not to think as they do and not to hold their beliefs. For this I will die. A practical outcome from their point of view because it means one less unbeliever, and evidence of this treatment to deter other people from thinking independently.

Part of their task is to discover why I don’t think like them. The irony of this is that they will think as I do one day.

They’ve kept things simple, reducing their targets to people, books, films etcetera, which influenced my thinking. From this I predict torture of people I name – and further censorship of any media I mention.

Through silence I can help preserve this golden line of awakening for others to follow. Not that this is a great thing; there are as many golden lines, potential or actually followed, as there are people.

My cell is cold: that’s a form of torture used for centuries. I’m rarely allowed to sleep, ditto. Years ago I read of one person able to sleep open-eyed. Unfortunately that is not something I’ve achieved. If I close my eyes more than to blink, the cell door crashes open and I’m dragged, body scraping on concrete and too weak to stop it. Nakedness, watching my fingers and toes slowly turning black, the pain-tortures, relentless questions and the stench rising from my putrid rotting body are also means to encourage my cooperation. Also, in this technological age, I’m forced to watch videos of victims tortured before me, what they have gone through, what I will go through if I don’t talk.

That’s where the torturers are in terms of human enlightenment and that’s why I can’t communicate.

There is no morality in this. Being what I am I know judgement is a waste of time. When younger, more naive and susceptible to indoctrination, I could have done just what they are doing. No, moral judgement is just an early stage of development and quite useless later on. We all need to evolve. Or do we? I think some people either get there very fast or start off way ahead of others.

Bastards! – strange, but in this hell there is still humour.

Surely I can’t last much longer. My lungs barely work from repeated water-boarding, though they’ve stopped that now, and I would imagine I’ve a fair amount of brain damage from it too.

The outcome of not being able, or wanting, to communicate with them is that I’ll erode their doctrines by showing there is greater strength elsewhere. They don’t need my golden line – being immersed in their own. Reality, or the lack of it, is relentless. As animal thinkers humans are forced to reflect upon experience. My torturers are living in the truth whether they like it or not. It will constantly erode their beliefs, doctrines and paradigms.

They will grow at their own pace and follow the route that suits them. Yes, they will look back at their past and shudder but few of us can do otherwise. If I told them the truth they would dismiss it – they’ve heard it all before. The untruth shouts louder, tells them what to regard as goals and how to achieve them. This is unspeakably cruel, because if they actually get there they can only see they got nowhere – if they dare assess their situation at all.

My only jobs here are not to reward their beliefs and practices … and to die as fast as I can to avoid suffering more than I need to.

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©Gary Bonn, 2018