Benares, or On Death and Life

I spent the last 3 days in Benares.
This city is exceptional starting with its name. In fact is has two well known: Benares and Varanasi, one in Sanskrit and one in Hindi. The it is also called Kashi, "the luminous", since the times of the Rigveda.
Well, it is luminous. The first impression I had was all about light: walking through the narrows street and finally seeing the very sacred Ganga through a vault was quite impressive. Inner peace and openness of space struck me. Then I saw people bathing and swimming in the water. The atmosphere was inspiring, relaxed. Almost weightless. All of a sudden, I felt very well.
Is this what you are supposed to experience visiting the holiest city of north India? Is this the very much spoken about spirituality India is famous for? Is that it, and all of it?

Varanasi turned into the place where the strongest taboos I inherited since I'm born (from...let's say 'western culture'?) came to be challenged. And violently so.
This is because Varanasi is the place where a Hindu is supposed to die to escape the cycle of death and life linked to reincarnation. It is the place where cremations are done. That is for a Hindu, I guess, even if I don't know. The Indian friends to whom I told I was going there would say it is not a good place to go for tourism.
What I experienced (and still experience the days after) is the loss of coordinates about life and death, their physical separateness, that border/wall/line western culture (let me say it and bear with me) is possibly both build on and fond of. The loss of the border lines between the two was then the critical break point. My deepest taboo about death, the way I conceive it in relation to life were reversed and confused. This because I cannot understand why you would "wash" or "purify", or swim, drink, plunge yourself in the same water where corpse float, few hundred meters far form you. Still, that is my problem, those who do it are not bothered at all, they enjoy their time in the water. The feeling of sickness I got from that is a lack of understanding, a cultural gap. It is also very difficult to bridge. Not every human being has a natural repulsion with respect to death, particularly dead body, or parts of it, be it cremated or floating in your river. Not more so if the contact with that is daily and direct, the Ganga being the sacred cradle for it all.

How to conciliate the vision of burning places, where you see piles of big black wooden chops and the profile of skeleton wrapped in the flames after due rituals have being carried out and that one of the ghats where children play in the Ganga, people shave and bath under the beautiful light of December's sun?

I'm definitely left with strong images, even stronger cultural challenges and a memorable week-end in which my deepest beliefs about human nature were put into discussion. That was India in one extreme go: the opposites which are not opposed, the contradiction which is not a contradiction and a conception of time, purity and beauty very far away from what I recognise as familiar. India is not easy, but whose problem is this?