Retrieve Selected value from the column of the table PHP

Question

How can i retrieve selected value of the 'level' column from the table VBmembers to set it as $level variable?

    session_start();

if (isset($_SESSION['user']))
{
    $user = $_SESSION['user'];
    $query = "SELECT level FROM VBmembers WHERE user='$user'";
    $level = queryMysql($query);
    $loggedin = TRUE;
}
else $loggedin = FALSE;

queryMysql function code

function queryMysql($query)
{
    $result = mysql_query($query) or die ('ivalid query: ' . mysql_error());
    return $result;
}

Answer 1

You need a couple of more steps, most importantly fetching the data in a usable way from the result:

$user = $_SESSION['user'];
$query = "SELECT level FROM VBmembers WHERE user='$user'";
$result = queryMysql($query);
$row = mysql_fetch_array($result);
$level = $row['level'];
$loggedin = TRUE;

As I stated in comments, your script is at risk for SQL Injection Attacks.

If you can, you should stop using mysql_* functions . These extensions have been removed in PHP 7. Learn about prepared statements for PDO and MySQLi and consider using PDO, it's really not hard .