Found: first by way of sex

From the great Luis Cernuda, holy be his name:

"You've said it before: you can neither perceive nor want nor understand a thing that doesn't come into you first by way of sex, and from there to your heart and then your head. And that's why your experience, your mystic harmony, begins as a sexual foreshadowing. But it isn't possible to seek it out or provoke it willingly; it's given only when and the way it wants to be."

from "Harmony" in Written in Water: The Prose Poems of Luis Cernuda