Acharya Prashant emphasizes that practice is very important. All practice involves discomfort, pushing your boundaries, and testing and negating your limits. The world will continue to exercise its charm over you, and you will have to consciously negate and deny it. This is not always a pretty thing to behold; it is obvious that you are in a struggle, but there is no other way. Conscious practice of anything is good; rather, it is the only possible way. From the worldly point of view, the life of the spiritual man is not a pretty sight to behold because there is a constant strife. The world is pulling, pushing, attacking, charming, and threatening you, and you are doing all you can to resist the charm and negate the threat. A battlefield is not a place for tourists; you don't go there to take selfies or to look pretty. The life of the real, authentic person may not look pretty, but if you can truly look, there would be great beauty in it. This is the beauty that is there in the Bhagavad Gita. The armies are arranged on two sides, with Shri Krishna and Arjun in the middle, with their weapons, chariots, horses, and elephants. There is the blowing of conch shells, and so much blood is to flow, relationships to be snapped, and pain to be endured. From all that, the Bhagavad Gita arises. It is not a meticulously manicured orchard setting with a peaceful monk discoursing to a receptive listener. The scene of the Gita is not pretty; there is a tussle, anger, hurt, and bloodshed, if not outwardly, then at least inwardly, within you. Therein comes the role of conscious practice, which entails a lot of inner bloodshed. One should not look for prettiness, but for piousness. Unfortunately, a lot of spirituality today is 'teddy bear spirituality'—cozy, comfortable, soft, something you can go to bed with, something that sits nicely with all the other toys in your life. The Bhagavad Gita cannot sit well with the nonsense that pervades ordinary life; it disrupts. It is the dynamite that annihilates. That's the role of consciousness. Shri Krishna is imparting consciousness, and Arjun is being encouraged to practice it. When consciousness is practiced, heads roll, the first being your own. That is the very purpose of the deliberate practice of consciousness: to cut off your own head. With your own head gone, you are headless and heedless enough not to care for others' heads. You get rid of your own head through conscious practice. Practice means incremental, daily, moment-to-moment improvement. You have to move step-by-step, even towards the absolute. No one step, not even a million steps, can take you to the absolute, but still, there is no way except the million steps.