The Project

What is the Fate Project?

The Fate Project offers a simple, five-point practice that brings together free will and fate as subscribed to by the ancient Greeks. Fate practice is designed to make life richer, more beautiful, more peaceful, and far more satisfying than it can be on the path of willfulness and hubris. Fate practice is concerned with the excellence of being human, the refinement of character, and that “human flourishing” that transforms our life into a work of art.

Historical Background

In the ancient Greek world, Moira was the divine personification of individual fate and necessity, usually depicted as an old woman who issued one's "share" at birth. Sometimes this deity appears in the plural, as three women, the moirae, but Homer (800 B.C) uses the singular as a rule. Divine personalities of various sorts, broadly termed "the gods," were central to the Greek mythos, and these beings were anything but aloof, routinely interceding in human affairs. Indeed, devotion to the gods was considered a supreme responsibility, and hubris before them an offense of such enormity, it courted disastrous consequences. While the Greeks regarded hubris primarily as an offense perpetrated by mortals against each other, in rare cases the gods themselves were the target. Prometheus, for example, defied Zeus by giving fire and other comforts to the world, and subsequently was condemned to having his liver eaten by vultures for eternity. While his audacity involved the hubris of a god before a higher god rather than man against the gods, perhaps it opened the door. In Plato's Symposium, Socrates tells a mythic tale of human hubris and divine retaliation to explain both heterosexual and homosexual attraction. Other examples of human hubris before heavenly authority abound in various spiritual traditions and writings.

The idea that mortals could be so arrogant and overconfident that they would defy or try to defy divine will, fate, and prophecy appears as early as Homer but is fully realized some three centuries later in Hellenic tragedy, most famously in Sophocles's play Oedipus Rex, in which we see a consummately heroic individual unwittingly arranging his own downfall through his failure to yield to the ineluctable authority of forces greater than his own will.

It is a fundamental irony of Attic tragedy that, while we are "the chattel of the gods" (Socrates) and entirely dependent on their will, we ourselves bring about our fate by the most basic choice we can make in any situation, viz., either to acknowledge and accept our dependence or deny it and willfully assert our authority over and against whatever is trying to work itself out in our experience.

It would be a mistake, however, to think that we're to understand fate only in terms of hubris and tragedy. There's another path open to us—the path of areté, often translated as "virtue" but more accurately as "virtuosity" or "excellence," which is far truer to the Greek world-view, for the Greeks prized and to an unprecedented extent realized excellence in all things cultural—the visual and performance arts, music, politics, sports, philosophy, and letters. They also recognized an areté to being human, a kind of excellence in living.

Our Policies

The following discloses our policies with respect to maintaining your privacy, and provides statements about how we handle refund requests for Online Store purchases and enrollments. Doing business with the Fate Project implies your acceptance of these policies.

Site Use: In interacting with the Fate Project, you agree not to use the site resources, including email, the get in touch form on our Resources page, or other method of communication in any way that is defamatory, abusive, vulgar, hateful, harassing, obscene, profane, sexually oriented, threatening, disrespectful, invasive of a person’s privacy, "adult" in nature, or otherwise in violation of any International or United States Federal law. These Terms also prohibit using site resources including our get in touch form or email addresses to send spam or solicit business in any form, attempt to establish social networking, or communicate about matters not directly related to the Fate Project.

Terms of Study: Over the years, we've established the following Terms of Study to ensure that students receive the greatest benefit from their work with us, and to preserve the integrity of our curriculum and programs.

1. The student should call in each week on a landline phone, as cell phones and VoIP phones such as Skype may result in poor network performance on the phone bridge. Students who opt to place the call via cell phone or VoIP assume responsibility for the acceptability of the connection. In the event that such calls cause excessive noise, repeat disconnects, or other issues that hinder the normal course of study, the instructor may end the call early and reschedule the missed meeting at a time when the student has access to a landline.
2. iStudy classes are scheduled to take place over consecutive weeks. Given the flexibility of the format, however, either the student or the instructor may reschedule a given week with a minimum of two days notice, up to a maximum of three classes per session. Rescheduled meetings are added to the end of the schedule. If a student misses two rescheduled classes in a row, the missed class cannot be made up and will not be added to the schedule.
3. Students may sign up for iStudy as often as they wish.
4. The student should arrange to phone the bridge a few minutes before the start of the call each week and be free to stay the entire hour. Students who have Call Waiting should disable it prior to placing the call.
5. All students of the Fate Project are required to maintain an attitude of respect for the instructor, and to refrain from polemics, sarcasm, profanity, and any other inappropriate forms of expression during the call and in emails or other forms of communication. The failure to honor this requirement may result in loss of access to the phone bridge, Fate Project support, and eligibility for future enrollments.
6. Phone bridge numbers and PIN access codes are to be kept confidential and used only during the session in which the student is enrolled.

Your Privacy: We do not nor will we ever share, sell, or otherwise make available to any third parties the contact information you provide. There are no lists from which you need to "opt out." We recognize that you provide us with this information as an act of trust, and respect your right of privacy as we would want ours to be respected.

Email and Get in Touch Comments: We may request permission from you to reprint on our news page, in a blog posting, or elsewhere on the site, excerpts from email or get in touch notes sent to us by you, with proper attribution, if we feel the content has value for our audience.

Online Store Refunds: All Fate Project Online Store items are provided in digital format via download, and are not eligible for refund. If we have a question about your order and cannot get an email response within 48 hours, we will refund your purchase in full.

Tuition Refunds: Tuition for iStudy enrollment will be refunded in full on request and enrollment canceled up to seven (7) business days prior to the scheduled iStudy session start date, after which no refunds will be issued. Refunds for scheduled fate coaching sessions are issued upon request no later than two (2) business days prior to the scheduled session, after which no refunds will be issued.\

Session Scheduling: Those who register for a coaching session must complete scheduling of the session within 48 hours of registering, or we will refund payment for the session back to the same source, as it is not our policy to hold funds for an indeterminate period.

Right of Refusal: We reserve the right to refuse registration, enrollment, or support to any person as we may deem necessary to ensure the integrity of our programs and ongoing relationships. If a student's enrollment is canceled by us, he or she will receive a prorated refund of tuition for any remaining weeks in the session. Fate coaching sessions canceled by us are refunded in full. Coaching sessions canceled by us are refunded in full. Students who distribute the Fate Project's proprietery material may lose support and other student benefits at our sole discretion.

Visitor Data: We use any personal information you provide solely for our internal contact, purchase, and billing purposes; this may include your name, billing and shipping addresses, phone number, and email. Use of this information is limited to Fate Project business, offers, subscriptions, and updates relevant to transactions initiated by you. We consider this information confidential, and do not make it available to third parties for marketing or promotion. Financial data (e.g., credit card numbers) are not collected or stored on our site.

IP Addresses and Cookies: Our site does not use cookies to collect or track information about you or your computer, nor do we detect or capture your IP address.

Changes to the Site: Changes may appear on this site at any time including those affecting Online Store pricing and availability, live study offerings and tuition, and shipping terms and costs.

Legal: Musings is a trademark of the Fate Project. All content on this site is protected under U.S. copyright and international law, and may not be reproduced in any form or medium without the written consent of the Fate Project.

Our Founder and Director

Philip Golabuk founded the Fate Project to offer a simple, powerful model and method for living in cooperation with fate. The approach cuts at the common root of human problems ranging from individual conflicts of every sort to the global calamities of world poverty and hunger, the destruction of the planetary ecology, and the failure of our species to recognize that violence and war are self-defeating. Philip completed his undergraduate and graduate degrees in philosophy with special studies in metaphysics, phenomenology, religious philosophy, and theory of knowledge at the University of Florida, where he worked closely with Dr. James Millikan, a phenomenologist, and Dr. Tom Hanna, a pioneer in somatics. From 1973-1993, he taught philosophy at the college level and as part of special outreach programs to inmates in jail and prison, and wrote several books in applied philosophy, including Recovering From A Broken Heart; The Sunset Grill Chronicles; and Walls, Windows, and Doorways, which have been published in the U.S. and overseas in translation. In addition to serving as the Fate Project's director, Philip founded and directs the Fate Project. He also writes literary fiction, and recently completed his third novel.

Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Jimi Millikan for sharing his rare understanding of the world of the Greek philosophers, especially Socrates, and for reminding us always to practice philosophy not merely academically, but "in the marketplace" where it can help shape us into more than we were.

Deep appreciation is offered here, too, for the influence of the late Thomas Hanna, a brilliant and inspiring professor and somatics pioneer who gave our director a real appreciation for the subtleties of Greek tragedy and their implications for human choice. All these years later, since his death, his presence is still at once keenly felt and sorely missed.

Finally, these acknowledgments must include a debt of gratitude tto the immortal Socrates himself, declared by the Delphic Oracle to be "the wisest of men" in knowing that he knew nothing. If there has ever been a greater teacher in the history of Western culture, he has yet to be discovered.