Genesis 42:9 Meaning Joseph Remembered the Dreams Which He Dreamed

Buried knowledge rises to meet the very brothers who tried to bury it. Joseph, the dreamer whose name means adding or increasing, is the visionary faculty in a person, sold off and thought lost, now risen to rule in Egypt, the realm of the body and its dense matter. His dreams are the inner foreknowing that never died, returning at the moment the lower faculties come seeking food they cannot find in themselves.

To call them spies searching out the nakedness of the land is to name their hidden motive: the exposed, undefended condition of the self. The brothers are the ordinary drives that once rejected the dreaming power and now stand before it unknowing. What looks like a ruler's suspicion of foreigners is the higher vision meeting its own former betrayers and reading straight through them.

Joseph: the dreaming, increasing vision in a person, cast off and thought dead yet risen to rule the body The dreams: the inner foreknowing that survives every attempt to bury it and returns to govern The brothers: the ordinary lower drives that once rejected the visionary faculty and now come to it in need Egypt: the realm of the body and dense matter where the higher vision is set to reign The nakedness of the land: the exposed, undefended condition of the self, its weak and unguarded places