Review: Unlock Happiness by Mastering the Self by Shobeir Shobeyri

A spiritual meditation focused on achieving balance, harmony, and self-control, Unlock Happiness by Mastering the Self by Shobeir Shobeyri is an original and comprehensive take on self-help. Deploying an accessible and aphoristic style, Shobeyri details his philosophy on life with the same clarity and control he recommends readers put into their own lives.

The book begins with Shobeyri’s vision of the human self as divided into body, soul, and mind. The body is the locus of action: physical wants push us to achieve, and satisfy the needs of remaining alive. The soul has more elevated desires, which in its turn prevents bodily excess from dominating action. The mind, meanwhile, governs both, acting as a mediator and common denominator between the two, guiding bodily action and giving expression to the soul’s deeper needs.

Shobeyri roots his ideas in both natural philosophy and more spiritual and even religious notions, emphasizing the history of the cosmos and evolution as resulting in the existence of human beings and their higher consciousness. The religious element should not be seen as dogmatic, however: Shobeyri’s conception is of a universe created by a supreme being, but he maintains an admirable, ecumenical distance from any one religion. In so doing, he keeps his ideas open to all regardless of background.

Though this spiritual emphasis may sound as though the book has a decidedly new age leaning, the book’s primary concern is emotional well-being over spiritual fulfillment. A substantial section of the book is focused on the affirmation of self-worth, so while Shobeyri may inject some macro ideas about creation, these tenets are interwoven well into his overall thesis, mostly aimed at integrating and balancing the different parts of the self. In Shobeyri’s conception, intellect and emotions do not work against each other but in tandem, and the key is to balance one’s wants, needs, and desires, integrating fact and feeling, subjectivity and objectivity.

Shobeyri is a calm and patient exponent of his ideas, often deploying parable and analogy to his advantage, not just in clarifying his ideas but varying them, showing different shades and different facets to a point. While this is mostly effective, there is a tendency to overuse analogies to the point of repetition – looking at the same issue from different angles, when the point has already been made. This is exacerbated by an awkwardness in the language, at times, as the author attempts to cover the same topic in different ways, using sometimes stilted diction in the process. Still, the author’s overall style more than achieves its goals through a winning directness, simplicity, and candor.

All in all, Unlock Happiness by Mastering the Self is a distinctive contribution to the self-help genre because of Shobeyri’s intellectual rigor – where many works of self-help can seem like a book of positive aphorisms, Shobeyri’s focus is a more fully realized philosophy on managing the self, which is almost clinical in its prescriptions. Blending together naturalistic and spiritual concerns, and outlining a clearly defined vision of how to fine balance within oneself, the book will appeal equally to readers of popular philosophy and ethics as it will to self-help, offering concise answers to complex questions.