The philosopher Alan Watts once said:

“Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery — the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets — is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together.”

If that is true then it would spell trouble for one of the most fundamental parts of Mormon doctrine – the idea that we are all eternal spirit bodies sent from our Heavenly home to be born into and tested inside of our physical bodies here on Earth. The Church would have us believe that we are spirit bodies in the same form as our physical bodies (Ether 3:16), residing in and controlling our physical bodies from within.

But if every outside has an inside, then there are at least two main problems with this idea.

First, the outside of our physical bodies implies that there is an inside to them as well, and we all know that there is. So, if on the inside of our bodies we find only the inside of our bodies, where is the spirit body? Take a look inside anyone’s body and all you will ever find is the inside of their body and nothing else – no separate spirit body is ever anywhere to be found (but please let me know if you find one). But whether it can be detected or not, even if we do have a spirit body that is separate from and inside of our physical bodies, then that spirit body would also have an outside and an inside. But what’s on the inside of our spirit bodies? As far as I know The Church doesn’t say.

If I have a body inside of my body that is controlling my body to some degree, what’s inside of the body inside of my body? Another body controlling that body? And if I have a body inside of my body that is controlled by a body inside of it, what’s inside of the body inside of my body inside of my body? Another body controlling that body? And so on and so forth, ad infinitum. And which one am I, or am I all of them? Or am I none of them, but something else entirely?

To postulate that a human body has a controlling body in the same form inside of it, like some kind of Russian nesting doll, only answers a question by creating another question. And either we get caught in an infinite regression of an outside found inside of an inside which implies an inside inside of that, or one of these bodies doesn’t have a matching body nested inside of it. Maybe one of these bodies has only its own inside inside of it, and not the outside of another body. I pick the first body.

The bodies we already have, our physical bodies, have an outside and an inside. On the inside we already find plenty of inside systems of parts that make us tick, taking up space and telling us, that although we may still want to believe it for various reasons, we don’t really need another body inside of our body to control us or to explain anything about us at all.

If the outside of another body such as a spirit body is not detectable on the inside of a human body by an outside observer, then the human body is only one human form, with its own inside, and not two human forms with one, spiritual, placed inside of the other, physical, as in the traditional Mormon belief. The human body does contain elements of itself inside of itself which have their own outsides and insides and outsides inside of that, but they are there in the body to be found and studied as far as the methods of scientific inquiry permit, as opposed to the Mormon spirit body which supposedly is there but can only be discerned by “purer eyes” (see Doctrine and Covenants 131:7-8), which is probably just a fancy way of excusing why it’s invisible. And 179 years after Joseph Smith instructed the world as to why it’s invisible, even with all of our advanced science and technology, it’s still invisible.

Not only is the Mormon spirit body invisible, it is undetectable in any way, except when we believe that it is detectable. Some might say that it is detectable because they believe or even know that they feel it, and to that I would say, that may be true for you, but it is not true for me, at least not anymore, because I now have other explanations for the spiritual feelings I had before. And if it’s not true for both of us, then it may be true for one of us, but it’s probably not true on its own.

Humans bodies are living organisms, and, true to their nature, they grow from the inside out, from a single cell into trillions, and they do so on their own as part of and in relationship to their environment, because that is what organisms do. Self-organizing, self-replicating, self-maintaining – living organisms. They do not rely on an outside agent to inhabit them in order to do what they do. The agent is not inside the organism, the agent IS the organism, because the organism has grown into the agent.

By teaching that each of us is really an immortal spirit body inside of a mortal physical body, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints separates and hides us from our true selves. Rather than fully understanding and appreciating what our bodies are already doing naturally on their own, The Church stubbornly clings to the archaic idea that the experience of human life is too important, too complex, and too sacred to allow it to explain itself as it is on its own, rather than as The Church thinks it should be. Ironically, as the church that places the most emphasis on living prophets and continuing revelation, it is the one best poised to evolve in the direction of science and philosophy on this issue of the spiritual vs. the physical, what they really are, and which one really makes the other move.

If anything, it would make more sense to say that the physical human body itself is a spirit body. If it can’t experience itself before its own birth or after its own death, then its experience of itself is eternal to itself. If at the subatomic level the body is mostly made up of “empty space” or something more like electron clouds, then it is ghost-like at some level. And as far as we know from our own direct experience, we need our physical human bodies in order to even experience the spiritual. Even with a near death experience, although the experiencer may feel they have had an out of body experience, they never would have had it, and they never could have told anyone about it, without their physical body.

If we cannot know the spiritual without the physical, then isn’t a physical which controls the spiritual far more likely than a spiritual which controls the physical? And if the physical body is eternal in some way, ghost-like in some way, and always there in some way during a spiritual experience, what more do we need to call it spiritual? Do we need it to do any other tricks for us? How about healing itself? Or healing others like it? And what about its brain, widely considered the most complex object in the known universe?

In thinking about the human brain, the control center of the body, we can come back to the problem of outsides and insides. Does The Church’s spirit body include a spirit brain inside of it? If so, does that mean my physical brain has a spiritual brain inside of it? If it does, what is on the inside of my spiritual brain? I could outside/inside my brain for a few steps or for forever to try to get to the brain that has only its own brain matter inside of it, or I coud just admit that the physical, human brain inside my head is the only one I have. And there is a very real sense in which I don’t actually have it at all. The one body with one brain that I feel myself to be stirs my soul with a mystery, wonder, and appreciation that I’ve realized is far more spiritual to me than to pass the buck to a spirit body.

As I’ve heard the late Christopher Hitchens observe, “I don’t have a body, I am a body.” And if I am one body, then I cannot be another at the same time. Whether I am physical or spiritual, although I will not last forever in this form to others, I will last forever in this form to me…and how could I ask for anything more?