Hi everyone.  This is such an awesome article, that I wanted to share it with you. It's by my friend Sharon Carne of Sound Wellness and posted with her permission.  Thanks Sharon!  

"I have been working with quartz crystals and with quartz crystal singing bowls for many years. It NEVER ceases to amaze me how powerful their effect is.

Quartz is a powerful amplifier. And when you add sound to that as you do with a singing crystal bowl, you are in for deep healing and deep connection.

Over the past few months, I have been noticing more and more people becoming interested in the singing bowls – especially the quartz singing bowls. And there have been some deep and profound meditation experiences at my monthly singing bowl meditations here in Calgary.

I have always had an intense curiosity to find out how and why things work. My own experience with quartz crystal and the crystal bowls has been profound.

Today, I wanted to share with you information about how and why quartz crystal works.  Let’s take a look at quartz. Quartz is a mineral made up of Silicon Dioxide (SiO2) and is one of the most common minerals on earth. It usually grows as a hexagonal crystal that is either formed out of igneous material, or has been dissolved in water and crystallized as the water evaporates, if under the right conditions of intense heat and pressure.

Quartz is the second most common and abundant mineral in the earth’s crust. And is found everywhere on earth. Feldspar is the most abundant mineral. Clear quartz is most common. It can also be found in other colours including purple or amethyst, white or cloudy, pink or rose quartz, gray, brown or black, sometimes called smoky quartz, and yellow quartz which is also known as citrine.

In our modern world, quartz is used in sandpaper, manmade glass, televisions, radios, clocks, optical lenses, computers, jewelry and even as building stone.

The ancient ruins of a healing temple in Egypt still have quartz crystal beds upon which people received healing. It is becoming increasingly well known that the Egyptians used sound in particular for healing purposes. A singing crystal bowl was found in Egypt that dates back to 1700 BCE.

The human body also contains a variety of crystalline structures:   your bones, blood and DNA. Your brain has a liquid crystal-colloidal structure. On a molecular level, your cells contain silica.

Quartz has the capacity to store information.  Here is a quote from an article called “The Legacy of Marcel Vogel” http://www.vogelcrystals.net/legacy_of_marcel_vogel.htm

“The ability of crystals to store information is widely known.  According to the September 4, 1994, issue of Newsweek, Stanford University physicists have demonstrated the first fully digital model of a device that stores information as a hologram within the subatomic structure of a crystal. 

The scientists were able to store and retrieve a holographic image of the Mona Lisa.  The particular crystal held only 163 kilobytes of memory, but it is expected that these holographic units could store up to one million megabytes.  The short article says that crystals store information in three dimensions and could be ten times faster than the fastest systems currently available.”

Properties of quartz were studied in great depth by the scientist Marcel Vogel who lived from 1917 to 1991. Vogel was a pioneer in the field of luminescence. By the time he was 12 he had synthesized a chemical luminescent material that matched the luminescence of the firefly. After university, Vogel pioneered many products through his company, Vogel Luminescence Corporation. He sold this company in 1957 and went to work for IBM as a research scientist.

He became IBM’s most prolific inventor, which included work on magnetic recording media, liquid crystals and the development of the red hue used in television.

When you look at the time on your alarm clock in the morning or on your microwave – the liquid crystal display is thanks to the pioneering work of Marcel Vogel. While at IBM, Vogel became more and more interested in the properties of quartz crystal, which he studied for 17 years.

Here is a quote from on article called, “Quartz Crystal Basics” which summarizes some of the important results of his research:  http://www.vogelcrystals.net/Crystal%20Basics.htm

“There are fundamental basics about quartz crystals discovered by Dr. Marcel Vogel in his years of research. These are:

1. Crystals have no intrinsic power. They are very sensitive and precise tools that will accumulate a charge from an individual using the crystal, amplify that charge and transmit it through the crystal to a designated destination via breath and intent. In this case the crystal functions as a bio-energetic template, transducer and transmitter.
2. A crystal acts as an amplifier of the bio-energetic fields surrounding the body of an individual. These fields are generally controlled by breath.
3. The energy fields that are stored in the body of a crystal will fit the structure of water. When a charged crystal is directed into a body of water, a charge transfer takes place, causing a significant number of the water molecules to become structured, developing a liquid crystal state at room temperature. There is a measurable change in the hydrogen bonding as observed by infra-red and ultra-violet spectro-photometry. There is also a change in the electrical conductivity of the water, the surface tension, pH, and freezing point.
4. The charge accumulated in a crystal can be store and transferred to a) another crystal, b) water (or any other fluid), or c) another person”