391. That a spirit enjoys a pulse and respiration exactly as a man does in a body can only be proved by spirits and angels themselves, when permission to speak with them is granted. This permission has been given to me; wherefore, when questioned on this matter, they affirmed that they are men exactly like men in the world, that they enjoy the use of a body just as men do, except that it is spiritual, and that they feel the beating of the heart in the chest and of the artery in the wrist just as men do in the natural world. I have questioned many of them and they have said the same. I have been permitted to know from personal experience that man's spirit breathes within his body. On one occasion the angels were allowed to control my respiration, to lessen it at will, and at last to withdraw it so far that only the breathing of my spirit remained, which was then perceptible to sense. The same thing happened when I was permitted to learn the state of the dying, as may be seen in the work on HEAVEN AND HELL (n. 449). Sometimes also I have been brought into the breathing of my spirit alone as far as to perceive sensibly its harmony with the general respiration of heaven. I have many times been in a state like that of the angels, and also been raised up to them in heaven, and being then in the spirit outside the body, I have conversed with them with respiration in the same manner as in the world. From these and other actual proofs I saw plainly that man's spirit breathes, not only in the body, but also after it has left the body; that the spirit's breathing is so silent that a man does not notice it; and that it flows into the manifest breathing of the body almost as cause flows into effect, and thought into the lungs and by means of the lungs into speech. Hence it is also plain that the conjunction of the spirit and body in man exists by means of the correspondence of the cardiac and pulmonary motions of both.