Today's scholars write with a higher degree certainty on properties and origins of Topaz crystal. Aluminum, silicate (Quartz), fluoride and hydroxide molecules were bonded together during volcanic eruptions. Left to cool in pegmatite's and granitites for thousands of year, aluminum bonding with oxygen (hydroxide) formed a chain of connected octahedrons, held together by silicate tetrahedrons, that sometimes grew into gigantic crystals.

One of largest Topaz ever found was a 600 pound specimen in Brazil. You can see it today at Museum of Natural History in New York. A rare, perfect blue gemstone was discovered in Ural Mountains of Russia in 1965. It weighed 100 kilograms. In Norway, a 137 pound crystal was found in 1901 that was two feet long.

Its unique crystal structure makes Topaz a hard and dense gemstone. In fact, pure clear Topaz has often been mistaken for Diamond because of their similar density, clarity and hardness. Topaz crystals can terminate in a variety of ways, some are dome-shapped, pyramids, prismatic, tabular and often with striations.

Its crystalline formation also allows gem to hold an electric charge for up to 30 hours. You can charge a Topaz by rubbing it with your fingers. Some Brazilian stones acquire a charge just by holding ends of crystal between your fingertips. Heating gem then allowing it to cool slowly builds an electrified charge greater than any achieved with other stones. Plus stone will retain that energy for more than a day after cooling down.

Most Topaz is found in its purest form, clear. Sometimes referred to as silver or white Topaz. Blue and green are rarest colors. Most commercial blue Topaz are clear crystals that have been irradiated then heat treated to create color. Imperial, or golden Topaz is second most common variety. These stones often contain chromium and are heat-treated to bring out a rosy-red to pink hue in gem. Pink Topaz does occur naturally more often than rare blues. Still it's always best to ask your jeweler if stones you are considering have been treated to enhance their color. Topaz is found around globe; Australia, North and South America, Russia, Sri Lanka, Japan, Tasmania, Africa, Pakistan, Norway and China. Tourmaline, Fluorite, Quartz and Mica are just some of gemstones that can occur with it.

Many ancient traditions and beliefs have created a brilliant history for Topaz. Clear, terminated Topaz was referred to as an iris stone because of is double refractive qualities and way its facets would project Light's rainbow spectrum. If worn in a ring on left hand, gem was believed to restrain lustful desires.

Egyptians thought Imperial Topaz was captured light of Sun God Ra. It was worn in amulets for protection from accident or attacks. Greeks and Romans also associated golden crystals with their Sun God, Jupiter. They believed stone increased their strength and could neutralize enchantments.

We have a corporeal body. It is a physical entity, subject to all laws of physics. Yet, we experience ourselves, our internal lives, external events in a manner which provokes us to postulate existence of a corresponding, non-physical ontos, entity. This corresponding entity ostensibly incorporates a dimension of our being which, in principle, can never be tackled with instruments and formal logic of science.

A compromise was proposed long ago: soul is nothing but our self awareness or way that we experience ourselves. But this is a flawed solution. It is flawed because it assumes that human experience is uniform, unequivocal and identical. It might well be so - but there is no methodologically rigorous way of proving it. We have no way to objectively ascertain that all of us experience pain in same manner or that pain that we experience is same in all of us. This is even when causes of sensation are carefully controlled and monitored.

A scientist might say that it is only a matter of time before we find exact part of brain which is responsible for specific pain in our gedankenexperiment. Moreover, will add our gedankenscientist, in due course, science will even be able to demonstrate a monovalent relationship between a pattern of brain activity in situ and aforementioned pain. In other words, scientific claim is that patterns of brain activity ARE pain itself.

Such an argument is, prima facie, inadmissible. The fact that two events coincide (even if they do so forever) does not make them identical. The serial occurrence of two events does not make one of them cause and other effect, as is well known. Similarly, contemporaneous occurrence of two events only means that they are correlated. A correlate is not an alter ego. It is not an aspect of same event. The brain activity is what appears WHEN pain happens - it by no means follows that it IS pain itself.

A stronger argument would crystallize if it was convincingly and repeatedly demonstrated that playing back these patterns of brain activity induces same pain. Even in such a case, we would be talking about cause and effect rather than identity of pain and its correlate in brain.

The gap is even bigger when we try to apply natural languages to description of emotions and sensations. This seems close to impossible. How can one even half accurately communicate one's anguish, love, fear, or desire? We are prisoners in universe of our emotions, never to emerge and weapons of language are useless. Each one of us develops his or her own, idiosyncratic, unique emotional language. It is not a jargon, or a dialect because it cannot be translated or communicated. No dictionary can ever be constructed to bridge this lingual gap. In principle, experience is incommunicable. People - in very far future - may be able to harbour same emotions, chemically or otherwise induced in them. One brain could directly take over another and make it feel same. Yet, even then these experiences will not be communicable and we will have no way available to us to compare and decide whether there was an identity of sensations or of emotions.

Still, when we say "sadness", we all seem to understand what we are talking about. In remotest and furthest reaches of earth people share this feeling of being sad. The feeling might be evoked by disparate circumstances - yet, we all seem to share some basic element of "being sad". So, what is this element?

We have already said that we are confined to using idiosyncratic emotional languages and that no dictionary is possible between them.

Now we will postulate existence of a meta language. This is a language common to all humans, indeed, it seems to be language of being human. Emotions are but phrases in this language. This language must exist - otherwise all communication between humans would have ceased to exist. It would appear that relationship between this universal language and idiosyncratic, individualistic languages is a relation of correlation. Pain is correlated to brain activity, on one hand - and to this universal language, on other. We would, therefore, tend to parsimoniously assume that two correlates are but one and same. In other words, it may well be that brain activity which "goes together" is but physical manifestation of meta-lingual element "PAIN". We feel pain and this is our experience, unique, incommunicable, expressed solely in our idiosyncratic language.

We know that we are feeling pain and we communicate it to others. As we do so, we use meta, universal language. The very use (or even thought of using) this language provokes brain activity which is so closely correlated with pain.

It is important to clarify that universal language could well be a physical one. Possibly, even genetic. Nature might have endowed us with this universal language to improve our chances to survive. The communication of emotions is of an unparalleled evolutionary importance and a species devoid of ability to communicate existence of pain - would perish. Pain is our guardian against perils of our surroundings.