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10 September 2018

Recently it has been proposed to adopt the understanding of consciousness as a “pure experience” for the purpose of diagnosing the patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC). In the paper the authors stated that while this suggestion is original and novel, without placing such Eastern notion in the Western tradition it is difficult to see how pure experience could be usefully operationalized to make sense in the clinical practice with

DOC patients. It is so because pure experience is a subjective phenomenon which is completely inaccessible in noncommunicative DOC patients and also it does not express behaviorally, therefore some objective-like operationalization is needed. This is why the fusion of Eastern and Western traditions is required to gain the full potential of this suggestion. The authors further proposed that such fusion could be achieved on the basis of the Operational Architectonics (OA) theory of brain-mind functioning (Fingelkurts et al. 2010 and Fingelkurts et al. 2013) which suits ideally the purpose due its compatibility with both Western and Eastern traditions of consciousness.