A Door
He wrote “levels of being“ on the chalkboard and I remember thinking, what the heck does that mean? I can be forgiven for the cluelessness I suppose because I was only 12 and this was a Sunday school class, where all kinds of kooky ideas were always getting thrown around.
Like, before creation, the heavens were without form and void. I went right into hyperspace and wondered how anything could be without form AND without void…. I wondered if maybe somebody forgot a comma. But this WAS the Bible, and they probably had some pretty good proofreaders. So I had to consider that it was just as it said. Definitely got my mind whirring.
Dave Sheets was a philosophy major at TCU and when he talked to us about different levels of understanding and existence, I got the idea, but I didn’t really GET it until he said it was like trying to explain death to a four-year-old.
At 12, that made sense. And the point of that talk was that it isn’t that people at different levels are better or worse than people at other levels, it’s just a different experience of being.
It’s not necessarily better to be 12 or 4 or 68. And it’s not necessarily better to have a complex experience or understanding of life than a simple one. And vice versa. They’re just different.
I was taught in that church (South Hills CC) that God loves all Creation. That rain falls on the just and the unjust. Wow, talk about unfair! (and reassuring, whew..).
How might this whole kingdom of heaven business come to pass, I thought as a child. Was it some magical process that would happen regardless of anything I did, or was I somehow involved? All the time and energy being devoted to teaching us seemed to suggest the latter. Or maybe that was just preparing us for some inevitability.
Were they training us to cope in the world while tipping our hats to the idea that there is some sort of greater one, that we may experience or not?
That would not have felt right to me, and it was not what I was taught in that church. We were told there to follow Jesus. Not just worship him or pray to him or revere him. But to follow him. Walk in his footsteps. Take in his teachings and carry them out as best we can, knowing that we are loved and forgiven already for all the times we have and will mess things up.
So how am I or any of us to participate, whatever that means, in the bringing about of something that might be called the kingdom of God, or heaven, or eternal bliss or universal consciousness, or maybe just peace on Earth?
…when we are planted here in this existence with so many different Levels of Being involved?
The question is still very much alive, even after a lifetime of exploring eastern philosophies, modern physics, living systems, indigenous spiritual traditions, and the nature of Creation-being-making.
What is happening now? Who am I now? What do I do now?
That childhood church was a doorway for me. That childhood. That religion. That community. It is not where I am now, but I got to where I am now through it. And I am profoundly grateful for that family, that church, those teachings, and that level of being that made it possible to be at this one in the ways I am now.
And just like when I was four, and 12, I still don’t know now what I don’t know. And I’m grateful for that too. To quote a different, but also very precious scripture, I’m not dead yet!
These thoughts emerged as I was thinking about TuneU, the tuning through improvisational sound practice. I've been doing a lot of redesign over the last year or so (2025), which has recently come into deeper clarity here at tuneu.us.
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