Kuí, hexagram 38

Squinting

Gui is the hexagram of ‘the others’, which may be people, or gods and spirits, or maybe even a situation which is not at all what you're used to. Stephen Field translates the name as "A Sighting", which may be a good or bad omen, something hard to interpret.

On Gui-day the oracle was consulted, and everyone was apprehensive about what would be. A good or bad harvest, an angry ancestor when one has done something wrong or forgot an offering. Many had reason for 'squinting'. But it means also the unknown others one stares at, those one feels different from, or simply are not oneself: standing face to face with you, talking or silent, nice or unfriendly.

Hex.38

GUI3: The character consists of an offering mat for oblations (2) and two eyes (1). The offering mat is a cyclical character: the one that indicates yin water (bringing oblations? Or the four world-rivers meeting in the center?). The day of gui was the day when the prognostications were made for the next period of 10 days, and it was a kind of Sunday, no hard labor or expeditions and such.
GUI3: diverging, extraordinary, to part, to separate, unusual, strange, to squint, to stare at. With sun instead of eyes: in opposition (like sun and moon at full moon). So with eyes it is like ‘opposition-eyes’.

The trigrams: Fire over the Marsh
Above is the fire, below is the marsh, squinting. The noble one is similar and yet different.
Marsh or Lake is where everyone meets, the place of social interaction. It is a place of joy but also of all those things which make contact difficult. Love and jealousy, understanding and hate, help and attack. Fire brings all these things in the open. It is suddenly very clear how different someone is from you - and you have to find ways to deal wih that.

More about hex. 37 and 38