Down on the banks of the Ganges at Varanasi you enter into a different dimension of time and space. There really is nowhere like it. Here on these ghats is a world so raw, so surreal, that it borders on the frightening. However did the Hindus create such a juncture of this world and the next? Here life throbs with a dizzying intensity. There is an urgency, a frantic disposition of the soul where the boundary between life and death seems to have been rubbed away.

Many Westerners will be shocked by this place. You can sense their discomfort, their sense of an alien spirituality. But linger. Expose yourself to this visceral scene and be tormented. Nowhere will ask such questions of your life – your actions, the karmic burden you carry with you. Go down to the Ganges at Varanasi and feel the very shock of being alive and the feeling that your life’s account is in the reckoning.