Having your head in the clouds and your feet on the ground is really not so hard. The hard part is keeping the head and the body connected while they're stretched so far.

Esau was a guy who didn't do too well at this. He was a brilliant student of his father Isaac, but his feet weren't just on the ground--they were in the mud. Esau understood and wanted all the right things--his father's teachings, his blessings, his heritage--but his body just wouldn't let him. He was a torn man in everything he did. In fact, to this day, the head of Esau is buried together with Isaac, while his body is buried out in the field.

Esau set the precedent for another great philosopher--the one everyone blames for the mind-body disconnect. His name was René Descartes and his skull is sitting on display in the Museum of Man in Paris, while his body is lying in a church. Talk about putting Descartes before the horse!

So how do you keep the lines of communication open over such a distance? The key is a switchboard designed just for this purpose called the heart. If your mind is satisfied with gazing at the beauty up there beyond the clouds, uttering an occasional, "How nice, how transcendental!"--then it's just floating away. It's likely to get snagged on one of those tree branches or swallowed by a blue whale.

But if your mind keeps in regular dialog with the heart, as in:

"So what are you seeing up there, mind?"

"Oh, it's neat, real cool, heart!"

"Neat and cool--very nice. But how does it help me deal with the weather down here?"

And then the mind starts to describe to the heart its vision in vivid detail, until the heart, too, catches aflame with awe and amazement and pumps that inspiration out into the rest of the body to create an inspired life down here on earth.

That's when you get a well-integrated, harmonious person like Jacob, Esau's brother. His life was an exercise in applied spirituality under the most earthly circumstances. In fact, his soul and body were so well integrated that even after his last breath, his soul remained with his body. And so they lie there together in the Cave of Machpelah, as the sages say, "Jacob, our father, never died."