Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/146

130 for reaching the condition in which phenomena may occur. Dr. Behanan says that the pause between inhalation and exhalation is "the main feature of all yogic varieties of breathing which are claimed to have spiritual value . . ." 17 He speaks of the different bright colors seen by him during these exercises and of his consciousness of a change in the level of respiration. It seemed to him that in this condition his respirations were very few and shallow. He noted a feeling of joy.

Dr. Bernard, who also investigated Thibetan techniques, laid more stress on the importance of holding the breath. The yogins were said to be able to hold it for about an hour, and he was told that unless he could keep it in for at least three minutes nothing of any significance would appear. He worked up to five minutes. In the second month he began to see lights and vivid colors, and finally a white light of great brilliance, which he was able to make appear at will by using the technique he had learned. An ecstatic condition of great joy sometimes ensued. Dr. Bernard quotes at length from the ancient yogic texts regarding the marvelous psychic phenomena which the accomplished yogin can produce at will. Seeing other worlds than ours, levitation, etc., are said to be the least of them. Incidentally he mentions one form of the exercises which involved mouth-breathing.

Swedenborg has left minute descriptions of the kind of mouthbreathing, shallow breathing, and "internal breathing" which he at first unconsciously and then consciously practiced when he was concentrating intensely on an intellectual problem, or, later, on a spiritual one. He came, he said, to be able to hold his breath almost entirely for "a little hour." 18

It is at least possible that his visions and feelings of lights, of colored flames, and of "joyful confirmatory brightness" went with the special kind of breathing which he was to develop even further with even more startling results.

Western mystics of all ages as well as Eastern yogins agree on the overwhelming sense of conviction which their experience of the "light" brings to them, and it has been mentioned that Swedenborg interpreted his light-visions as signs of approbation, while he was writing a work that probably was his new book the Animal Kingdom or the "Soul's Kingdom of the Body" (Regnum Animale).