Young Joseph in his coat of many colours as his brothers watch with resentment
Joseph’s coat of many colours is the detail most of us carry away from Sunday school, yet for me the part of the story that rings truest is what befell Joseph once he began telling people his dreams. I grew up in a poor neighbourhood brimming with big dreams and plans, and those dreams were often mocked by my friends.
Most of my friends grew up in council houses. Owning property featured on no one’s list. Mine was simple and, to them, absurd: I was going to secure a mortgage and own my own home at 21. I would often ask, “Why not us? Why can’t we?” When I finally announced I was getting my first house, some friends visited me only once and never came round again. So when I read “Behold, this dreamer cometh,” I know precisely how that tone sounds.
On TrueCosmic, I do not read the story of Joseph as a chronicle of what befell one family in the ancient Near East. I read it as a story told with intent, because a story can carry what a list of facts never could. The sages who shaped it folded something precious within it, and our work is to decipher it. And when we do, we discover that it describes us, and the discovery stirs a power within us that has long lain dormant.
This is written for those who still hold the Bible sacred yet have grown weary of the way it was taught to them, or worn down by the hypocrisy they witnessed in religious institutions. It is no attack on anyone’s faith. If you read Joseph’s life as literal history, you are honoured here. But I will not pretend the two readings are equals: the literal is where we begin, and the inner meaning is where the dream is leading.
The story opens in Genesis 37. Jacob, who by now bears the name Israel, has twelve sons, and he makes no secret of which one he loves most:
“Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age: and he made him a coat of many colours.” (Genesis 37:3, KJV)
His brothers resent the favour, and then Joseph makes matters worse. He dreams that his brothers’ sheaves of grain bow down to his sheaf, and later that the sun, the moon and eleven stars bow down to him. He recounts both dreams to them. “And Joseph dreamed a dream, and he told it his brethren: and they hated him yet the more” (Genesis 37:5, KJV).
When his father sends him out to see how his brothers fare in the fields, they watch him approach:
“And they said one to another, Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now therefore, and let us slay him, and cast him into some pit, and we will say, Some evil beast hath devoured him: and we shall see what will become of his dreams.” (Genesis 37:19 to 20, KJV)
They strip him of the coat and cast him into a dry pit. Rather than kill him, they sell him to traders bound for Egypt, dip the coat in goat’s blood and let their father believe him dead. In Egypt, Joseph serves in Potiphar’s house, is falsely accused and thrown into prison. There he interprets dreams, and in time he is summoned to interpret Pharaoh’s: seven years of plenty, then seven of famine. Pharaoh raises him to govern the land.
When famine strikes, his brothers journey to Egypt to buy grain, not knowing who stands before them, and “Joseph’s brethren came, and bowed down themselves before him with their faces to the earth” (Genesis 42:6, KJV). The dream has come to pass.
Neville Goddard addressed Joseph directly. In his lecture “Prophetic Sketches 1967”, he said:
“In the 37th chapter of the Book of Genesis, Joseph – the one God loves most and who is the prototype of Christ Jesus – is made a coat of many colors.”
And in the same lecture he showed his audience how to read stories such as this one:
“These prophetic sketches are sketches of events which will happen in you.”
That is the key to the entire story. Joseph is no distant figure from long ago. He is a pattern that unfolds within you, and by linking him to the Jesus of scripture, Neville marks him as the beloved son in every one of us.
Neville did not trace every stage of the story in these words, so the reading that follows is TrueCosmic’s own, built upon his principle that these events happen in you.
The father bestows the coat. It is neither earned nor bought. In this reading, the coat of many colours is your imagination: the many-coloured self that can assume any state, wear any shade, envision any outcome. It is the gift the Father gives to the beloved son, and it is what makes Joseph a dreamer in the first place.
This way of reading clothing is far older than Neville. The mystic Manly P. Hall, in The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928), explains in his chapter “The Human Body in Symbolism” that the garments in sacred stories were never mere costume:
“The garments and ornamentations supposedly worn by the gods are also keys, for in the Mysteries clothing was considered as synonymous with form.”
(Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages)
Hall adds that, in the old teaching, a person “was clothed in his own accomplishments and adorned by his attainments.” Set that beside Neville and the coat comes alive. A garment is a form you step into, and a state is precisely that: something you put on and wear until the world beholds you in it. In TrueCosmic’s reading, the many colours are every state the imagination can wear. They are not ornament. They are the full range of who you can become.
The brothers are the outer world, and the doubts within you that take its side. They see the coat and they despise it, because the coat declares that you are more than your circumstances. When you speak your dream aloud, the outer world replies just as they did: “we shall see what will become of his dreams.”
That was my experience. Where I grew up, announcing that I was getting my first house sounded like Joseph telling his brothers about the sheaves. The friends who visited once and never came round again were simply living in a different state, and my declaration did not fit within it.
Then comes the pit. Genesis says “the pit was empty, there was no water in it” (Genesis 37:24, KJV). The coat is gone, the dream appears dead, and there is no trace of anything that might keep it alive. After the pit comes the prison. This is the in-between, the long stretch between the assumption and its fulfilment, when every shred of evidence insists it was all a fantasy.
As with most manifestations, I had my own pit. There is always a season when things look doomed. The house I was originally due to buy fell through because I was in a chain, and the whole procedure had to begin again. If you are in such a season, I have written more about spiritual guidance during life transitions.
The dream was never in the coat. They could strip the coat from Joseph, but not the dream out of him.
There is a deeper layer here that most readers walk straight past. Joseph is not only a dreamer. He interprets dreams: the butler’s, the baker’s and, at last, Pharaoh’s. When the two prisoners are troubled because no one can explain their dreams, Joseph replies: “Do not interpretations belong to God? tell me them, I pray you” (Genesis 40:8, KJV). Then he interprets them himself.
Neville saw exactly what that signifies. In his lecture “A Movement of Mind”, he said:
“Now, if only God can interpret a dream, why tell Joseph? Because he is a personification of God.”
And in his lecture “Esau Jacob Israel”, he named the faculty at work:
“He could not only dream, he could interpret dreams, for this faculty in man that dreams is man’s imagination, and any interpreter of dreams is man’s imagination.”
This is the central character of scripture, hidden in plain sight. The divine is no remote figure observing the story from outside. It is the dreamer and the interpreter within it, and that is who we are too. Remember, this is our story.
Neville even pointed to the very shape of Genesis. The book opens with “In the beginning God” and closes with Joseph: “he was put in a coffin in Egypt” (Genesis 50:26, KJV). In his lecture “Moses-Elijah-Jesus”, he said:
“Joseph is human imagination – it is of one tissue with divine imagination, but here it is human imagination, placed in a coffin.”
God opens the book and Joseph closes it, because they are one being: the divine imagination, asleep in us, dreaming our lives into being until it awakens.
Joseph does not reach his throne by any route he could have devised. Sold, enslaved, accused and forgotten in a cell, every step proves to be the road to Pharaoh’s court. Egypt, in this story, is where the dream is worked out in the world of form. You can read more about this symbol in our article on what Egypt represents in the Bible.
Neville described this very movement in his lecture “The Lord, Our Potter”:
“Then wait in confidence for ways to open that you could not devise. No one knows how or when it will happen, but it will. You will find yourself walking across some bridge of incident that you did not consciously devise, which takes you to your freedom”
The bridge of incident is often unpredictable. I did not get my house at 21. I got a house a year later, and the house I secured in the end surpassed anything I could have imagined: bigger, in a better area, and cheaper. The route I had planned collapsed, and the end arrived finer than the one I had pictured.
That is the greatest mistake people make with the Law: micromanaging how the result arrives. Had I clung to that first house, I would have forfeited the better one. Decide the end, and leave the route open.
When the brothers finally bow, Joseph does not seek revenge. Instead he says:
“But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is at this day, to save much people alive.” (Genesis 50:20, KJV)
They meant evil against him, and that is precisely the point. Neville returned to this in his lectures again and again. Along the bridge of incidents, events can appear, through our limited awareness, as a wrong, an injustice, even evil. Only at the end do you realise that every one of them was necessary for the wish to be fulfilled. Neville offered a very practical example in his lecture “Live In The End”, concerning someone who wished to rise at work:
“I have seen that. It takes someone to fire you to get you into a better job. I have seen that time and again. I wouldn’t go out and quit the job. You may be promoted in the job, or you may be invited by some other concern that is competitive to join them”
He knew it from his own life. In his lecture “Freedom”, he described being let go from J. C. Penney, where he ran the elevator and worked as the errand boy, and he said:
“But my dreams, my desires, transcended my position there, so they had to do what they did in order for my desires to be realized.”
Joseph’s brothers did exactly what they did, and it carried him all the way to Pharaoh’s court.
This is the part of the story I understand best in hindsight. I was raised a Jehovah’s Witness and a Baptist, and I left the church at 18. Today I am genuinely grateful to my former church members. Had they not responded to my questioning as they did, I might still be in the sleep of Adam, unawakened to the truth of who I am.
Neville expressed it this way in Seedtime and Harvest, Chapter One:
“According to the Scriptures, we sleep with Adam and wake with Christ. That is, we sleep collectively and wake individually.”
Awakening is always set in motion by adversity or by a burning desire to know the truth. This was simply my own path. What looked like evil against me was the very thing that impelled me towards waking up. And Neville is clear about where that path ends. In his lecture “Follow The Pattern”, he said: “You are destined to awaken as God!” I sincerely believe that, which is why there is nothing left to hold against anyone.
This is a practice, not a trick. Consider a marathon runner. Nobody completes a marathon on the strength of one good morning. The runner trains day after day, through weary legs and grey weather, and on race day the distance that once looked impossible is simply run. The pit and the prison are the same: miles in the middle that every dream must cover.
Deciphering the story of Joseph is like discovering a key that was in your pocket all along. The coat, the pit, the prison and the throne were never solely about one man in Egypt. They describe a door within you that has stayed locked while you believed the outer world’s verdict on your dreams. When you perceive the pattern, the key turns, and the dormant power behind that door begins to stir.
Keep reading: What Is the Ark of the Covenant? The Hidden Temple Within You. For the bigger picture, see our complete guide to esoteric Bible interpretation.
On the surface, the coat is a token of Jacob’s special love for Joseph. In TrueCosmic’s inner reading, it is the imagination, the many-coloured self bestowed by the Father, able to assume any state. Neville called Joseph “the one God loves most,” which points to the beloved son within each of us. The mystic Manly P. Hall observed that in the ancient Mysteries clothing was treated as a symbol of form, which accords closely with this reading.
Genesis offers two reasons: their father loved Joseph more than the rest of them, and Joseph told them dreams in which they bowed down to him. Read inwardly, the brothers are the outer world, which always resists a dream that reaches beyond present circumstances.
Literally, it is the dry pit into which his brothers cast him before selling him to traders. Inwardly, it is the in-between: the season after you assume your dream when everything appears lost. It is not the end of the story.
Not at all. Reading scripture for its hidden meaning is ancient: Philo of Alexandria read the stories of Genesis as allegories of the soul. The literal reading comes first, like Joseph’s elder brothers. And just as they bowed to the dreamer in the end, the outer reading comes to serve the inner one. And that realisation is no side note: it is the very catalyst for transformation.
Yes. In his lecture “Prophetic Sketches 1967,” Neville called Joseph “the prototype of Christ Jesus” and taught that these sketches are “events which will happen in you.” In “A Movement of Mind” he went further: because only God can interpret a dream, Joseph the interpreter “is a personification of God.”
Joseph’s coat was taken from him, but the dream it stood for never was. Through the pit, the prison and Egypt, the dream kept moving towards its fulfilment by roads Joseph could never have devised, and it ended not in revenge but in forgiveness. Mine did the same, a year late and finer than I had pictured.
Whatever pit you find yourself in today, the way out lies nowhere outside you. It is already within you, together with the very power that brought the universe into being, awaiting your word. You are the one who sets it in motion, and once you awaken it, no circumstance and no mocking voice can bar its path. Fear not.
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