What seems to make this emotional work possible, what is there for us to do, is to maintain an attitude of openness, of receptivity, of willingness to be diverted. It is precisely in these diversions that new meanings accrue and increased complexity is achieved. Complexity, for Dewey, is the primary measure of living well. As an organism increases in complexity, the rhythms of struggle and consummation in its relation to its environment are varied and prolonged, and they come to include within themselves an endless variety of sub-rhythms. The designs of living are widened and enriched.
Fulfillment is more massive and more subtly shaded.
That which will be a source of increased complexity, of increased meanings in our lives, therefore, will also be the sources of our more massive fulfillment. There seems to be a quality of the spiritual in all experience given the ways in which Dewey characterizes the experience of an experience. The kinds of descriptions that Dewey gives for the emotional quality of an experience, that which makes an experience esthetic, which is what makes an experience an experience, invoke a notion of the spiritual. Interestingly, what would certainly kill the capacity for spiritual experience for Dewey would be something like a belief, a determined resistance to being diverted. But from within the attitude of openness to diversion, the potential for spiritual experience would seem to be unlimited and pervasive.