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. 

At Ingo’s request, his memorial service was held beneath Nicholas Roerich’s Mother of the World. This choice was neither symbolic nor sentimental; it was a clear expression of the artistic and spiritual lineage Ingo felt part of. Roerich believed painting was a bridge to higher awareness, a way to reveal subtle realities that lie just beyond ordinary perception. Ingo shared this conviction deeply, and choosing the room beneath Mother of the World, a place of profound personal and spiritual meaning to him, as the setting for his memorial became his final tribute to an artist whose vision resonated with his own.

But Roerich was only one strand of the larger artistic tapestry that shaped Ingo’s work. Ingo aligned himself with a centuries-long lineage of artists who used imagery not merely to depict the world, but to reveal the unseen structures of consciousness, energy, and metaphysical reality. His own writing in Cosmic Art offers a remarkably clear window into the traditions he believed mattered most.

The Cosmic, Transcendental, and Metaphysical Lineage

In the forward of Cosmic Art, Ingo warns that modern art has drifted into a “materialistic approach to vision,” preoccupied with surface form while overlooking “the subjective, the transcendental, the mythic, the metaphysical, the parapsychological and the psychic.” He believed that much of contemporary culture had forgotten that art can (and should) express inner awareness of forces larger than physical reality. Ingo embraced what he and the Pipers called cosmic art: art that arises when an artist expresses a felt relationship with larger, unseen forces or dimensions of being. He describes transcendental art as work emerging from “inner spaces,” capable of expressing “expansive mental and spiritual experiences… universes beyond the concrete.” This is the terrain in which Ingo placed himself, a territory defined not by schools or movements but by vision. From this perspective, his influences come not from stylistic mimicry but from shared purpose.

Nicholas Roerich: The Painter of Subtle Worlds

Roerich’s influence on Ingo is both personal and philosophical. Roerich envisioned the Himalayas not as mountains but as thresholds, gateways to invisible realms and inner luminosity. His paintings often reveal an atmosphere of heightened perception, where color and landscape become symbols of consciousness itself. For Ingo, Roerich provided a model of what art can do when it’s unafraid to reach toward the transcendent. Roerich showed that a painting could carry a sense of presence, a spiritual charge, a transmission. Ingo’s abstract luminous fields, his energetic structures, and his color-driven atmospheres echo that same conviction: that art can reveal the subtle architecture of the human spirit. And Roerich’s Mother of the World, the painting Ingo chose to be beneath at his memorial, embodies the very principle Ingo lived by: that behind the visible world is a vaster, organizing intelligence. Both painters sought to sense it, and to show it.

Hieronymus Bosch: Mapping the Inner Landscape

While Bosch worked centuries before Ingo, the kinship is unmistakable. Bosch treated painting as a psychological and metaphysical map; an externalization of inner states, archetypes, and symbolic forces. His art demonstrated that the “inner man,” as Ingo phrased it, contains whole worlds of imagery, meaning, and mystery. In Cosmic Art, Ingo writes of art that springs from “subjective visions,” “inner universes,” and “metaphysical categories” that shape existence itself. Bosch was one of the earliest practitioners of this. Though their visual languages differ, both aimed at the same goal: revealing the multidimensional nature of consciousness. Bosch did it through dense allegory; Swann through radiant abstraction. But both refused to treat the mind as a closed room.

The Abstract Spiritualists: Kandinsky, af Klint, and the Language of Energy

Ingo’s writing repeatedly emphasizes that art should express “significant relationships with larger… realities” and that abstraction can be a pathway toward revelation rather than escape. This places him close to the early abstract spiritualists (Kandinsky, Hilma af Klint, František Kupka) who believed:

• Color vibrates.
• Form is symbolic.
• Art is a vehicle of higher perception.
• Inner vision has structure.

Ingo was not imitating them. But he was working on the same problem: How do you paint what consciousness feels like from the inside? His arcs of color, radiant grids, chambers of light, and energy-field structures echo this tradition deeply.

Scientific Imagination and the New Vision of the Universe

One of the most unique influences in Ingo’s art is the scientific worldview, not the materialist version he rejected, but the new cosmology of fields, energies, space, and scale. In Cosmic Art, he writes that modern exploration of space and electronic energy must be matched by exploration of “the hidden powers of the human self” and the “new dimensions in spirit.” He describes consciousness as a “field of awareness” with its own structure, magnetism, and expansion. This is exactly what his paintings look like:

• waveforms
• magnetic arcs
• radiating fields
• cosmic chambers
• luminous geometries

Ingo fused metaphysics with the scientific imagination, creating visual language that feels as much like physics as it does like mysticism.

Surrealism and the Subconscious, With Reservations

Ingo respected the Surrealists for attempting to reach the subconscious, but he criticized them for focusing too heavily on “demonic themes” and not enough on the “intimations of the infinite and the divine.” Still, their willingness to abandon objective representation helped clear the ground for the kind of inner mapping Ingo valued. He saw Surrealism as a path toward visionary art, but not the endpoint.

A Synthesis of Traditions

In the final pages of the Cosmic Art forward, Ingo identifies what he calls a synthetic art form: art that blends:

• the representational
• the emotional
• the abstract
• the metaphysical

into a unified language aimed at revealing expanded states of awareness. This is the category where Ingo placed himself. This is the lineage his art belongs to. He wasn’t simply influenced by Roerich, Bosch, Kandinsky, or science. He synthesized them in pursuit of a higher goal: expressing consciousness as a vast, multidimensional reality.

A Unified Vision

If there is a single thread connecting Ingo’s influences, it is this: He believed art’s highest purpose was to reveal the invisible architecture of human awareness.

• Nicholas Roerich gave him the spiritual height.
• Bosch gave him the symbolic depth.
• The abstract spiritualists gave him the language of energy.
• Science gave him cosmological scale.
• And Cosmic Art gave him the philosophical framework.

Together, they shaped a body of work that stands as a map of expanded perception... Ingo’s lifelong pursuit.