Ep 587: What Spartans Can Teach You About Love and Leadership

In today’s episode of The Daily Vedantic, we start with Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire and the Spartan “shield to shield” battle formation — where your shield exists to protect the person next to you. From there, we dive into the Vedantic idea that true love is seeing no otherness, and what happens when you stop seeing your skills, talents, and resources as “mine” and start seeing them as belonging to your community and to all beings. Bit by bit, we expand the circle of identification from self, to family, to neighborhood, to humanity — and explore how life changes when you live as if your gifts are for the person on your left and right, not for your ego.

The Daily Vedantic is a daily podcast and YouTube channel dedicated to the timeless wisdom of the Upanishads (https://thedailyvedantic.com/). Dating back to over 5,000 years ago, the source of nearly all Eastern Philosophy, and loved by Western giants from Emerson to Thoreau to Carl Jung and Alan Watts, studied daily by Joseph Campbell to Aldous Huxley to Arthur Schopenhauer and countless others, The Daily Vedantic aims to make this ancient philosophy as modern and accessible as it is simple, practical — and profound.

James Beshara is a creator (Magic Mind, Apt, Tilt, acquired by Airbnb), podcaster (Yoga For Your Intellect, The Daily Vedantic), angel investor in over 150 companies (Gusto, Mercury, OpenAI), musician (openstate_), and encourager living in Malibu, California with his wife, 3 young daughters, their dachshund named Wendell, and their hamster named Smokey.

James also co-hosts Yoga For Your Intellect (https://www.YFYI.co), a biweekly long-form conversational podcast with his teacher Joseph Emmett ( https://www.instagram.com/yogaforyourintellect )

James is a student of Swami Parthasarathy, the acclaimed author of Vedanta Treatise (Vedanta Treatise – The Eternities)  and teacher at Vedanta Academy in Malavli, India. As James says often, when you’re ready for the real thing, Swami’s daily lectures are where the true wisdom and systematic discovery of the world’s oldest continually studied philosophy resides: https://www.vedantaworld.org