The Rule of Levels

Changing revelation by changing the dials of our lives

You can listen to the audio version of this essay here.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

   Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

   Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,

   Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

      Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

   Steady thy laden head across a brook;

   Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

      Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Isn’t it strange that you can learn about things later in life that it seems like you ought to have known about all along? This has been in my head as I’ve been thinking about these “levels” we’re going to talk about today. Mainly I’ve been thinking about—and Keats was a terrible segue to this, by the way—a video game called Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels. It’s a platformer that we used to play on the Super Nintendo, and back then for us it was just another Mario game to try to beat. We had it on a collection called Super Mario All-Stars with a few other games.

But it turns out that Lost Levels actually has a pretty interesting history. After Super Mario Bros., the original one, became such a big hit in the 80’s, Nintendo wanted to follow it up with a sequel to keep cashing in. And in Japan there was a sequel to the original Mario game: it was called Super Mario Bros. 2. But that game was so difficult that the Nintendo people in America felt like they couldn’t release it. So they instead took a different Japanese game, one called Doki Doki Panic, that had nothing to do with Mario at all, and they re-made it with Mario characters. And that re-made game became the one that we children of the 80’s and 90’s knew as Super Mario Bros. 2—it’s the one where you throw the eggs at Birdo. For us that was always the sequel to the original Super Mario Bros., and the game that came out before the great Super Mario Bros. 3.

But that really hard original sequel to the first Mario game did eventually reach America. They released it as Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels. So we were playing the original sequel all along, without having any idea we were doing it, because they had thought it was too hard for us. And frankly it probably was because I don’t remember ever beating it, even though I clearly remember beating the original Mario and Mario 3 many times.

Anyway, how did I not know this at the time? All I did was play video games. I subscribed to Nintendo Power and Electronic Gaming Monthly. I spent whole summers in front of the TV where my only breaks were trips to the bathroom, and I always sprinted in order to minimize my time away from the screen. My parents watched, hours by hours, the last oozings of my brain out my ears. My whole life was video games, and I didn’t know this basic point about the Mario games.

But I did once get Cloud and Barrett up to level 57 in the opening area of Final Fantasy VII. Two hours per day before school, every day, for a long time. So that makes up for my ignorance—and it was all totally worth it. Time well spent.

And our topic today is levels. It’s about how the different levels of our lives—levels of knowledge, levels of understanding, levels of lots of things—affect revelation. And all of these levels are manifestations of the context.

The origin of the rule of levels

Climbing the Rainbows started in 2022, but its roots go back much longer than that. The ideas on revelation I’ve been discussing for a while trace originally to my mission, where I was asking myself how this whole thing was supposed to work—was I really supposed to be inviting people just to pray about the Book of Mormon, and then get an answer that it’s true? It works just like that, that simply? And like every missionary I had moments when it seemed like it wasn’t working right at all. You get people who claim to be praying sincerely and don’t receive any answer, and back then I didn’t see any reason to doubt their story. (I still don’t doubt it, to be clear.) I didn’t believe the restored gospel was a fraud or that we were tricking people, but this sort of experience with others showed me that I was clearly not grasping some big part of the picture.

After I got home and started college, this stuff would come to my mind a lot as I would study the scriptures. And those studies eventually started to intertwine with what I was learning in classes: philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, the history of science. All of it kind of got thrown into a big pot, along with the scriptures and the thought of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, and the burner got set to “Walt Whitman” so it was just simmering, simmering, simmering for ages. All through my undergraduate years it simmered and it kept on a-simmerin’ during my masters degree and into the start of my PhD too.

And the product of all the simmering, the very earliest coherent and organized thoughts I had about all the stuff that puzzled me, I gave the name “the levels rule,” or the “rule of levels.” The “levels” were the different factors, both environmental and inside us, that could contribute to revelation, or to our understanding of the gospel. And that understanding—or the way God dispensed it to us—would in turn depend on all those factors. It would depend on all those levels.

Here’s how I put it in my original notes from years ago, in something like 2014 or 2015: