i just crossed the A&P again
deafeningly loud this time
i was thinking, the second night you guys were here, that i might've hit the three doors again, but i was guessing not because i didn't spot any evidence of an unknowing event following the face
now i think i might've
the face was like an ascii character 2 smiley, but stretched out even more vertically, pale on black such that the eyes and mouth seemed to be holes
still, i suspect even if it was a three doors, it was another non-functional one, and that i'm back at the A&P due to falling backward rather than cycling around

The face appeared visually during that night?

yeah
it somewhat reinforces the feeling i was talking about earlier, that the non-self door is locked from the other side
or simply... missing, somehow

All three doors need to be unlocked separately?

they're not supposed to need to be unlocked at all
actually, calling them "doors" is a bit of a misuse of terminology, the three characteristics correspond to the three door "aspects", and you go through one or two "door aspects" at once at the end of each insight cycle, apparently picked at random

Wait, didn't you say before that there might be a fourth door as well?
The Zen door?

the three door aspects map to the three characteristics; impermanence, suffering, and non-self
i was thinking absurdity might arguably be a basic characteristic too, but i've backed off on that, i'd say absurdity is a "secondary color", not a basic pathway in the brain, but a fusion of attachment and aversion
if so, the "absurdity door aspect" is simply the suffering door aspect in concert with the non-self door aspect
the way daniel describes that combination in MCTB is not what i experience, though, he says it's "cone-like", and i don't get that at all

then again, he also says it's "stretched out", and i think each time i've had a three doors experience with a non-self aspect, a couple of times during the minutes of high equanimity preceding it my visual field itself has seemed to be stretching out along one axis and squeezing in along the opposite one, the way a spacetime diagram distorts when the associated reference frame is accelerated

this time, my visual field was just black with some vague fizzy vibrational noise everywhere, so it was hard to tell if did any distorting, but it definitely did something spatially unusual at one or two points
the second time, i caught it acting as if it was a flat plane rotating about a diagonal axis drawn from lower left to upper right, with the lower right "corner of the screen" falling away from me (there's no actual edges or corners, but it's hard for me not to confabulate them in while describing it)
which is pretty similar, visually, to the one-axis squeezing effect

i'm pretty sure this time was the only time i've seen the face itself appear stretched, though
last time the face's aspect ratio was perfectly normal, but it appeared on a background of cyan and blue horizontal lines which had been created by the last of a sporadic series of stretching-and-squeezing distortions in the minute or two preceding the three doors
there was definitely an impermanence aspect present that time, as the visual field moved from right to left, the face appeared from the right / in / three / sharp / / and didn't get all the way "onto the screen"
the face's eyes weren't holes that time, but i still couldn't really make eye contact because it appeared in an abstract vector-based style wherein the lenses of the glasses it was wearing were opaque cyan rectangles with diagonal white "reflection" stripes
as usual, it was grinning

the way daniel describes the non-self door aspect is extremely topological, to the point that it makes me suspect that passing through it is somehow contingent on the genus or orientability of the attentional field
i'm dyslexic and i have no sense of direction, but i have 99th percentile spacial visualization and design memory aptitudes
as a child i was exposed to a lot of weird computer animation demos, including Not Knot, a remarkably comprehensible guide to an esoteric method of knot removal
rather than untying or cutting the knot, the video demonstrates how to bend and stretch the boundary of your fundamental domain such that space itself no longer extends to the knot-shaped region, leaving you in a geometry which the narrator calls "the hyperbolic structure for the link complement"
if anyone was going to have a sensate universe with a mutant topology, it would be me