There’s so much useful information in Shirley MacLaine’s new book, Sage-ing While Age-ing that I’m reading it for the second time around.

“I have been a questioner all my life,” she says in the foreword. “This impulse has motivated my political values, my creative work, my relationships, and my spiritual search for deeper meaning.”

MacLaine admits to knee and kidney surgery, and a facelift, along with a seriously grumbly gut and dental problems. And as she grows older, she admits to being afraid of more; but it doesn’t stop her.

Her extraordinary life has given her a 'Who’s Who' of mentors in science, quantum physics, allopathic medicine and alternative health.

She quotes highly plausible sources on UFOs and provides insight into the purpose of different celestial visits to Earth. Synchronistically but certainly no coincidence, in her eyes, is the fact that she now lives in Roswell, New Mexico; Mexico is a UFO city.

In what she calls ‘soul memory’, MacLaine refers to Atlantean scientists experimentally splitting hermaphrodites in two,on a psychic level, with results as harmful as splitting the atom has been. And they might have done something like that, too.

Having laid the grounds of her own personal perspective to the universe, MacLaine arrives at the nub of her book: 2012.

“Where will our perceptions of God and religion take us in the twenty-first century?” she asks. “Do we have to go through yet another religious crusade and war in order to truly understand that our perceptions of God are literally insane?”

MacLaine cites the ‘Shift of the Ages’ predicted by the Mayans, the Incas, the Hopis, Nostradamus and the Bible Code.

“The shift is supposed to occur somewhere between the 1980s and through 2012,” and “... time will begin to move more rapidly.”

She suggests that the coming ‘Armageddon’ will force us to face our collective ‘karma-geddon’. “This process will allow a healing to take place after a build-up of emotional and karmic toxins in the world lasting 26,000 years.”

In the past, I’ve found her work (she has written ten other books) intriguing and thought provoking but have taken what she says with ‘a grain of salt’.

On this occasion, however, there’s an unmistakeable air of authority. This may well be due to ‘ageing’ and ‘sageing’ but is also testimony to her solid research.