391. The fact that a spirit possesses a pulse and respiration like a person in the body in the world cannot be otherwise confirmed than by the testimony of spirits and angels themselves when the opportunity is granted to speak with them. I have been granted this opportunity, and when I have asked them therefore about this circumstance, they have said that they are just as much people as people in the world; that they, too, possess a body, only a spiritual one; and that they likewise feel the beating of the heart in the breast and the pulse of the arteries upon the wrist, just as those do who are people in the natural world. I have asked many of them about this, and they have made the same reply. [2] I have been granted to know from personal experience that a person's spirit breathes while in his body. Angels were once given an opportunity to control my respiration and to lessen it as they chose, and finally to take it away, until only the respiration of my spirit remained, and I then perceptibly felt it. The same thing happened to me when I was granted to experience the state of people dying, as may be seen in the book Heaven and Hell, no. 449. [3] Several other times, too, I have been reduced to the respiration of my spirit only, and I then perceptibly felt it to be concordant with the general respiration of heaven. On many occasions as well I have been in the same state as angels, and have also been raised up to them into heaven, and being then out of the body in the spirit, I have spoken with them with an exhalation of the breath, in the same way as in the world. [4] From these and other personally experienced proofs it has become apparent to me not only that a person's spirit breathes while in his body, but that it does so also after it has left the body; that the respiration of the spirit is so subtle as not to be perceived by the person; and that it flows into the manifest respiration of the body, much as a cause does into an effect, or thought into the lungs and through the lungs into speech. It is apparent from this also that the conjunction of the spirit and body in a person is due to the correspondence of their two cardiac motions and pulmonary motions.