Try a very simple experiment for just ten minutes.

Take a sheet of paper and a pen. Sit down alone. Write down whatever thought comes to mind as if a transcribing software has been connected to your mind. Transcribe exactly what you think. Do not edit or suppress any thoughts. It is an experiment only for you. No one else is going to look at what you have written. Visualize that a transcribing software has been connected to your mind. Just like how the transcribing software which is connected to a taped speech transcribes everything, transcribe whatever is going on in your mind verbatim. At the end of ten minutes, read what you wrote just once. You will be amazed! You can clearly see that there is no logic in the way thoughts form in your mind!

For example, you see a dog on the street. Immediately you remember the dog you were afraid of when you were young, or the one you used to play with when you were young. The next thought could be about your childhood. The third may be about the teacher and the room you used to sit in at school. The fourth may be about the house where your teacher used to live.

There is no logical connection between the dog that you recently saw on the street and the teacher who taught you in school. However, in a few seconds you simply jumped from seeing the dog to your childhood teacher. You can see that your thoughts are just moving, drifting from one thing to another. We can’t even call this ‘thinking’. It is just ‘association’, that’s all. You associate the dog with your childhood, your childhood with the teacher, and so on.

Actually, if you do this exercise just once, the very understanding that it gives you will transform the way you think about yourself, and how you treat yourself and others. Your whole life will be transformed.

source: Living Enlightenment