Mapping the Invisible

Ingo’s extraordinary contributions to consciousness research did not emerge from a single path or teaching. Long before he became known as one of the founders of remote viewing, he spent decades immersing himself in a remarkably wide range of spiritual, psychological, and esoteric traditions. He was never a follower in the conventional sense; he was an investigator, someone who moved deliberately among the world’s mystical and philosophical systems in search of functional insights into the nature of perception and the deeper capacities of the human mind.

His studies included Alice Bailey’s Arcane School, where he engaged deeply with esoteric psychology, meditation disciplines, and the concept of the New Group of World Servers. He explored Anthroposophy at Rudolf Steiner’s centers, examining Steiner’s model of intuitive cognition, subtle bodies, and spiritual science. He ventured into Fourth Way teachings, with their emphasis on self-observation, conscious effort, and the balanced development of the emotional, intellectual, and physical centers. Ingo also immersed himself in world religions and classical mystical texts, developing a profound appreciation of Yogic philosophy and the disciplined paths of the Eastern adepts.

In parallel, he pursued intensive study of astrology, not as a pop-cultural curiosity, but as a historical and symbolic science of consciousness. He became a devoted student of Alice Bailey’s esoteric astrology and later wrote extensively on the ancient, cultural, and scientific consequences of astrology’s erasure from modern discourse, arguing that its historical importance was foundational to human civilizations. His essay “The Perils of Erasing Astrology from the Past” remains one of the most articulate defenses of astrology’s significance in the study of human consciousness.

His interests extended further still. Ingo was deeply familiar with the readings of Edgar Cayce, whose emphasis on intuition, subtle energies, the nature of the soul, and the continuity of consciousness resonated strongly with his own lifelong investigations. These influences, alongside his friendships with figures like Harold Sherman, Shafica Karagulla, Viola Pettit Neal, Jan Ehrenwald, and others, shaped an intellectual landscape far broader than any single affiliation or teaching.

From this eclectic foundation emerged Ingo’s central idea of the “psychic humanoid,” a term he used to describe the deeper, largely untapped perceptual and energetic capacities within the human being. His later work in remote viewing and consciousness studies grew directly from this wide-ranging inquiry into perception, subtle energies, symbolic systems, and the structures of awareness.

To illuminate how he understood these themes in the early 1970s, Ingo articulated many of his emerging ideas in the paper he presented at the First International Congress of Parapsychology and Psychotronics in Prague (1973), “Scientological Techniques: A Modern Paradigm for the Exploration of Consciousness and Psychic Integration.” In this talk, Ingo did not promote Scientology as a belief system; rather, he analyzed specific early techniques through the lens of a consciousness researcher seeking workable methods. What interested him were their proposed mechanisms for expanding perception, dissolving fixed patterns of attention, and improving the ability to observe subtle internal states, capabilities he saw as essential for psychic functioning.

He placed these techniques in the broader landscape of psychology, cybernetics, behavioral science, and early information theory, arguing that any method capable of stabilizing attention or reducing inner noise could serve parapsychological research. The paper uniquely documents why certain exercises within Scientology appealed to him at that time, how he separated useful techniques from doctrine, and how he contextualized them among the many other traditions he had studied. It also contains his early formulation of “psychic integration”—the coordinated development of emotional, intellectual, intuitive, and energetic faculties. In retrospect, this presentation stands as a bridge between his esoteric training of the 1950s–60s and his groundbreaking work at SRI later that decade, capturing a researcher synthesizing ancient teachings and modern science into a unified model of consciousness.

Ingo’s work with Dr. Gerald Epstein, a psychiatrist known for his “waking-dream” method, opened a major new dimension in how he understood consciousness. Epstein’s approach involved entering a lightly altered state, not sleep, not trance, but a vivid inner awareness, and allowing spontaneous imagery to unfold while remaining fully awake. Unlike dream interpretation, this was participatory. You didn’t analyze the dream; you entered it, spoke to its figures, touched its environments, and watched how the imagery responded.

For someone like Ingo, already deeply attuned to subtle perception, this was a perfect fit. The method gave him a structured, repeatable way to explore consciousness not as something that produces imagery, but as something that can travel within imagery. In sessions, images had autonomy, responded to questions, revealed layers of meaning, and displayed complex symbolic architecture. Consciousness behaved less like a passive bystander and more like a creative, relational field.

One waking-dream experience recorded in his notes shows this vividly: moving through ruined landscapes that “came back to life” when he touched them, encountering a feminine presence described as “my unconscious,” and watching the sky pull back to reveal an immense and colorful universe beyond it.

These weren’t metaphors to Ingo, they were demonstrations that consciousness is capable of shifting vantage points, reorganizing perceptual reality, and interacting with inner imagery as though it were a real environment.

From these explorations, several insights became central to Ingo’s view of consciousness:

1. Consciousness is multi-layered and spatial, not confined to the brain. Epstein’s method showed Ingo that awareness can move through structured inner spaces with their own logic and landscapes. Consciousness isn’t a static point, it’s fluent, mobile, and capable of occupying multiple perceptual “locations.”
2. Imagery is not fantasy, it’s a mode of perception. For Ingo, waking-dream sessions reinforced that imagery is not merely symbolic decoration. It behaves like a perceptual channel, similar to what he experienced in remote viewing. Imagery responds, reveals, protects, and unfolds. It’s interactive.
3. The unconscious is not hidden, it’s accessible and dialogical. Through Epstein’s technique, Ingo encountered aspects of himself that presented as beings, environments, or energies. These interactions were not random. They carried intelligence, memory, and intention. Consciousness appeared to be a system of communicating layers.
4. The boundary between waking and dreaming is permeable. Ingo’s notes show a blending of states: dreams continuing as he awoke, or waking-dream imagery unfolding with the same coherence as night dreams. This led him to see consciousness as a continuum, not divided into neat compartments such as “awake,” “asleep,” “imagining,” or “perceiving.”
5. Creativity, perception, and inner vision all emerge from the same field. Epstein’s work affirmed something Ingo increasingly believed, that creativity, psychic functioning, dreaming, and spiritual insight all originate in a deeper stratum of mind that is always active and always communicating.

The impact on Ingo’s philosophy was significant:

• He began to view consciousness as an ecological system, not an isolated mind.
• He increasingly saw imagery as a real interface with deeper levels of reality, not just psychological symbolism.
• He recognized that perception (including psi perception) is a cooperative interaction between conscious and unconscious layers, not a single mechanism.
• And he became more convinced that humanity’s misunderstanding of consciousness stems from treating it as linear and material, rather than multidimensional and participatory.

In short, the waking-dream work validated and strengthened Ingo’s lifelong intuition:

consciousness is vastly more complex, more spacious, and more creative than conventional psychology acknowledges. And it can be explored directly.

Ingo’s original dream and waking-dream files are preserved in his archives at the University of West Georgia.