GILROY — Life is full of strange twists and ironies.
You head over to the phone to call someone, and the phone rings.
It’s that person.
GILROY — Life is full of strange twists and ironies.
You head over to the phone to call someone, and the phone rings. It’s that person.
You read a phrase in a book and someone comes up to you and says the line right as you read it.
To some it may seem like a chance occurrence, but not to Paul Cochrane.
“I think everyone has had an experience like this,” said Cochrane, who for a week in 1994 said he experienced a strange phenomenon called synchronicity, when everything in his life was in complete synchronization. “The question is, ‘Is it meaningful?’ If you look at it carefully, there is a reason. I think a lot of the time we ignore it.”
Cochrane’s experience with these strange meanings led him to a path of self-discovery and changed his views on the entire world around him, especially his faith.
“Throughout my life I’ve had some strange experiences,” Cochrane said. “I basically brought everything into one big picture.”
Cochrane said his experience with synchronicity began after a trip out of the country.
“It was triggered by a trip I took to Bali,” he said. “I had a very positive experience there. But as soon as I returned, things started happening.”
For that one week in 1994, Cochrane found that whatever he was thinking about came up in songs he heard, in phrases people told him and in symbolic pictures. He was also approached by people he didn’t know, who told them they had messages from his dead mother or that he was close to the answers he was seeking. The experience put him into a mental hospital.
“It was getting so strange I literally thought I was dying,” he said. “I kind of thought was the process you go through.”
However, Cochrane was released from the hospital and was told nothing was wrong with him. A psychiatrist told him it may have been a chemical imbalance.
“It went away, and things went back to normal,” he said. “Then nothing happened until 1996.”
In 1996, the phenomenon occurred again, and Cochrane, who has lived in Gilroy for 12 years and has been a firefighter for 22 years, began looking for meaning, which led to his book, “The Mind of God.”
“The entire book laid itself out. It literally came in a dream.” he said. “The question is, who is orchestrating these things.”
Cochrane decided to attempt to find the meaning of life by following the ideas of scientific theory to see if God existed. In fact, Cochrane now sees that scientific theory and religion are closer than most would think.
“They’re searching for the same thing on different levels,” Cochrane said. “They’re just using different methods.”
Cochrane said there is little difference in the two. Religion makes the hypothesis that there is a God while science doesn’t, and, for the most part, scientific research leads to a concrete answer while religion doesn’t.
“It’s totally your experiment,” he said. “That the difference between what I call the experiment of faith and the scientific experiment.”
Cochrane contends that someone must believe in religion for it to be true to them. He said evidence of this is in the Bible, when Jesus would ask someone if they believed in his power before he healed them.
“They’re actually involved in that,” he said. “They have to believe. In a very real sense, they are determining their own reality.
“When Jesus went back to Bethlehem, the people thought he was just a carpenter, and he couldn’t perform any miracles.”
Cochrane’s book not only outlines his personal experience and his road to discovery, but it goes into ideas like chaos theory and quantum mathematics and overlaps the ideas with Christianity with Eastern philosophy and religion, which he finds are very similar.
“It’s got a lot of deep ideas,” Cochrane said. “It’s not an easy read. But, basically, (the idea is) that we’re evolving as a race and our potential is way up there.”
“It is up to us. We can stay where we are at or evolve to a higher plane, where we would be completely unified. I call it a celestial society.”
Cochrane’s book is available at www.themindofgod.net and through all literature databases. He hopes to make copies available soon at the public library, the Wize Owl bookstore in Gilroy and BookSmart in Morgan Hill.
Cochrane said his book, although deeply involved in religion, isn’t designed to change people’s ideas on life.
“I’m not trying to change people’s beliefs,” he said. “It’s just telling my story of discovery, and I’m hopeful people will find it interesting. It will probably be most interesting to people with open ideas.”
