It's funny - you go along riding whichever groove you're in to the best of your ability, trying to mind your own business and have a quiet time of it, when all of a sudden, without warning, as if from nowhere, your life throws you a curved ball, things take on a bizarre twist, everything changes irreversibly and it leaves you stunned and thinking, nothing will ever be the same again. It doesn't make any difference how well you plan, or how well-stocked your larder of resources, sometimes - indeed often - the changes that occur of themselves can throw you totally off-balance, or worse.

This issue has always been central to my work over the past three decades - teaching and helping people to achieve an inner and outer balance so unshakeable that nothing life throws at them can upset their equilibrium, no matter how extreme.

Just recently in my own life, for instance, I had one week during which I conducted a memorial service for my father, saw a person I love all but smashed to pieces from a motorbike accident and found a young man of 21, whom I'd known since he was three and whom I considered to be an extra son, dead on the floor of his bedroom.

It so happened that during this same week, there was simultaneously a flurry of unprecedented positive activity in my career; stuff I'd dreamt of for 30 years suddenly came true.

Yet in neither extreme of grief nor elation did I once lose my composure other than briefly, expressing my displeasure after someone had committed a cock-up affecting my work and which I consider to have been the appropriate response in any case.

I'm not showing off about how centred I found myself to be - quite the reverse, because what enabled me to maintain this state of equipoise, was not taking any of it personally. Obviously, there were deep-felt emotions, but these were just emotions. Obviously, there was fierce mental processing occurring almost continuously, but this was just mental processing. Centredness came through not getting in the way of things, by not claiming credit for the good things nor taking blame for the bad. Things happened, I responded, simple as that.

But at the heart of the experience was emptiness. Not emptiness in the sense of void, but emptiness of self that allowed the inner space to be filled with consciousness, or, if you're feeling romantic about it, spirit.

Over the years, I've laboured to share publicly the methods by which I achieved (and achieve) my own peace and believe in all modesty, that I've managed to contribute something of value to my world, if only to make it smell a little sweeter.

However, a suspicion was growing in me that sharing the information through straightforward explanation might not be the most effective way to reach people's innermost selves. It occurred to me, in fact, that if I could weave the message into a fiction, it would be more palatable for everyone concerned.

So there I was all alone on the semi-arid desert island of Gomera, one of the lesser-known of the Canaries, favoured by alternative types and hippies from Frankfurt and the like. It was May 1998 and I'd gone there to finish writing Handbook for Modern Lovers, which I did much faster than anticipated, it being a racy subject and all, and found myself with nothing much to do and no one much to talk to other than the taciturn inhabitants of my remote, small and sombre fishing village. I tried walking over the volcano, but after two days the allure of the heights grew dim and my fingertips started to itch. I felt a pressure pushing down through my brain and wanting to escape through my fingers. So, half-reluctantly, I opened the Word programme on the computer, stared at the blank screen and waited to see what happened.

When I came to my senses, I noticed I'd written a story about a young man with large ears and unruly features called Brandell Willard, who was about to leap to his death from Suicide Bridge, when he was stayed by a being, 'maybe an angel, maybe a barefoot doctor', who proceeded to explain the basic metaphysical rationale for daily life and why ending it all prematurely would be the height of folly. Willard jumped anyway, 'stupid sod'.

It turns out a few stories later that Brandell Willard did not in fact die, but instead landed on a bouncy castle on the back of a passing truck headed for Aberdeen. The bigger picture then proceeds to unfold as one unlikely character after another takes centre stage, their tales intertwining across the four corners of the globe until the bigger meta-story reaches its grand climax on the island of Gomera.

If I was the sensible type, I would never have undertaken to devote the time and energy required to pull The Fables through to manifestation. But I'm not the sensible type. When a piece of work is trying to push through me, I either execute it or burst, no matter that it may be something so utterly uncommercial that no publisher in the land would risk investing in it, as indeed was the case with The Fables, which was turned down by all the big houses, until one day out of the blue, once I'd already accepted the probability I'd have to publish it myself as a limited edition, came a call from HarperCollins raving on about how I was the next Paul Coelho and giving me a fat deal for The Fables to prove they meant what they said.

And thus was born Twisted Fables For Twisted Minds (strapline: This will either heal you or make you go insane). Though I've managed to write each of my five self-help books published so far in world-record time of two weeks of non-stop writing, this only being possible because I know the subject well enough to spout continuously for up to 17 hours a day until I've said my piece, it took four years to complete The Fables novella; this isn't the sort of stuff you can write in a hurry - there's too much interplay between surrealism and hyperrealism to rush things while doing a proper job.

There's always a temptation to claim something you've written was channelled from a higher source, when in all probability it's more of a left brain-right brain issue, but I fear it's a temptation I can't resist, because I swear I could hear a voice - either deep inside my head, or wafting in from the foreboding-looking Atlantic waves, or both, encouraging me to keep going and selling to me the effectiveness of using parables as a device for getting the self-help message across. I had no plot in mind; it revealed itself. I never once had to shift the stories around to fit; they fitted themselves together as they went along. At no time did I wonder where the storyline would go next; it simply led itself.

Rationalising in retrospect tends to err on the side of mental masturbation, but reading through the book, as you have to many, many times during the rounds of editing that occur when you hand in a manuscript, it was apparent their effect was to instil an unbridled resilience and lend a sense of invincibility in the face of whatever life throws at you.

I hear snippets of crucial information from the book repeating in my head constantly - something I've not experienced after working on the self-help books. Being fiction, the stories are far from politically correct and are, in fact, as dark as a tale can get. They reflect and are indeed culled from the myriad stories I've heard or lived through during my travels to all parts of the globe.

I was once, for instance, chatting in the afternoon sun on the beach in Thailand, with a young man from London who owned a bar in a nearby sex-tourist town. This really meant he was running a de facto brothel. He fitted the part - heavy north London accent and the look and build of a bouncer. It turned out he was growing bored with the life and was suffering from tropical torpor. He felt a change was needed and was considering his options, which happened to be, to my amazement, returning to the UK and either writing a poetry book somewhere in the north country, as he put it, or teaching master classes in piano. (I found out he had a music degree, a fact born out when he gave me a quick but virtuoso recital on an old electric piano.)

Alternatively, he was thinking he may go to upland Cambodia and get involved with internet-related crime. This went straight into the book - under a different name, of course - in fact, the names of all the characters are some of the most bizarre I could imagine: Snopme Chaddelow, Quimper Frondondo, Zank Drazden, Kwipstah Tonk and many others.

It was usually the name that would inspire the story - the name would come into my head and the storyline write itself. Many came about during conversations with my middle son, Jake, which is why the book is dedicated to him. One night, for instance, when we were both a little the worse for wear, I was muttering on about getting a professional espresso machine, which came out as professo expressional, giving rise to Professo Expressional, loving relationships trainer, who has a sex change and ends up as an unassuming-looking Buddhist nun called Sister Kimbal Neosho.

There's a sense of ridiculousness to life, the way it rarely makes sense, which is reflected in The Fables - which, after enough exposure to the stories, seem to help inure you to events like the pointless death of my dear young friend.

But at the core of each of us lies a place of absolute stillness. The Chinese would call it the place where the Tao resides - the Tao being that ineffable generative force and consciousness that permeates, informs, animates and connects all known phenomena including you and me. When you manage to identify with that, rather than the ever-shifting external aspects of self, nothing can truly rock your boat again.

A device I used throughout was the appearance of a being - maybe an angel, maybe a barefoot doctor - at the point of absolute crisis in each of the characters' lives, who would tell them something that could turn their lives around there and then. At this point in traditional fables, were this device used, the characters' fortunes would turn around and things right themselves.

But Twisted Fables for Twisted Minds are by both name and nature twisted, hence because none of us listen to our inner guidance as much as we could and The Fables's characters are no different in this respect, after the being's appearance and subsequent disappearance in each of the stories, the characters' lives take on an even darker or more twisted turn. At the end of each fable, the being turns to camera, as it were, and talks directly to the reader, outlining the moral of the tale and providing a bona fide Barefoot antidote. Which fact leads me to be tempted to take a leaf out of that example and end this unashamedly self-promotional yet hopefully intriguing piece with a bit of impromptu 'fabalising'.

'Magnificentia Omreader squirmed in her seat as the idea of the words of the piece she was reading penetrated her brain. She was used to reading "Barefoot Doctor" at the rear of the magazine and to find him suddenly popping up this early on the page was unsettling her precious Sunday calm. She nonetheless soldiered on, occasionally stumbling over the odd extremely long and bendy sentence but generally doing fine until suddenly her entire mind was flooded by an unexpected and particularly bright light so she could no longer see the words on the page. In the midst of the light, as if put there by special effect, appeared a being, maybe an angel, maybe a barefoot doctor, who said: "Omreader, it would be foolhardy to spend too much energy trying to make sense of everything. Life isn't meant to make sense. It's that very messy undependability of it that makes it what it is." Then he tapped her lightly on the centre of her forehead three times and disappeared.

'Suddenly the light cleared and Magnificentia's eyes started tracking the words on the page again just in time to "hear" the writer "say", "Thank you for reading this. I'm privileged to have been given the rare opportunity to rant on like this. It's never easy tooting your own horn when you're basically a shy, retiring wallflower like me, but I must say I've enjoyed every minute of it and hope you did too."'