In Crossing to Avalon [the book I was reading when I discovered the Blogging the Artist’s Way group] in the chapter called The Wasteland: Depression and Despair, Jean Shinoda Bolen tells the story of one of her patients:

His "nightmare" was actually a waking experience that probably lasted
only a matter of seconds. It had occurred . . . at 2:00
P.M. on December 21. (Though he was unaware of it, December 21 is the
winter solstice, the darkest time of the year; there could not have
been a more symbolic date.) He was in a crosswalk near Union Square in
San Francisco, in the midst of Christmas shoppers and holiday
decorations, when suddenly he felt as if a motion picture had stopped
and the scene had frozen. First motion and sound dropped away, and
everyone and everything was suspended in a silent vacuum; then, as he
watched in horror, all color drained out — it was like "watching the
world suddenly bleed to death" — until everything was lifeless,
immobile, and in shades of gray.

A moment later, everything was as it had been before . . .

He felt like he had gotten a glimpse of the ultimate reality, and it
was empty, lifeless, meaningless. "This was what life really was like,
what lay beyond the maya, or the illusion of life," he thought . . .

Most depressions that take such a toll in spirit last for many, many
months, while his was over in a matter of seconds, minutes at the most.
I told him that it was the mystical opposite of illumination. It was an
experience of "endarkenment" as profound in its capacity to affect him
as an experience of enlightenment and subsequent recollection might be.

I have had this experience. This exact experience.

Except it was the opposite.

It is nearly as vivid — and indescribable — to me today as it was
when it occurred about thirty-five years ago. I was in my early
twenties. It was summer — we could even intuit that it was summer
solstice.

I was walking, as I did daily, the two miles or so between
work and home, in Billings, Montana. I don’t recall paying any more attention than usual to the
cement schoolyard on my left, or the paved street on my right, or the
sidewalk under my feet — but I noticed a weed pushing through the
sidewalk crack, and then, suddenly, I was suspended in a silent vacuum, watching the green world explode around me.

Stems pushed up from the ground, cracking pavement, becoming vines and
trees. It was as though I was in a timeless bubble, watching centuries
unfold before me. Plants climbed buildings; structures cracked and
eroded and shattered under the weight of vines, until any indication of
human habitation was gone. It was all jungle, wild and green and very,
very alive.

A moment later, everything was as it had been before . . .

I was standing on the sidewalk, on an ordinary street, on an ordinary day. But I knew that what had happened to me, what I had felt,
was not ordinary, and I tried to hold it all the way home — knowing
that it would slip away, that feeling that has no language. And it did.

But the memory of it did not. The certainty of it — that this was not
crazy, this was not an hallucination — this was something else,
something real, even if outside of everyday experience — that certainty stayed with
me, too. Has stayed with me, all these silent years.

Bolen says:

His particular spiritual path was taking him through the desert or wasteland; he was on the via negativa, the path where soul encounters negation and pain . . . why some travel the via positiva while others must travel the via negativa is one of those unknowables.

I suspect that those who travel any spiritual path, travel both.