Your thoughts would be: I want to feel the iron’s heat, I want to feel the pain of the iron, and that will be the truth. When the iron meets your cheek, you will feel a sense of elation, because your desire for pain was met. Rationally, you’re happy because it wasn’t the bullet.

This sounded extremely odd to me, until I reread it and realized that I'd already come close to using it. I did West Side Story my junior year. The whole score to the show is structured around the half-octave (also called the tritone, or the Devil's Interval -- basically the most dissonant interval in all of music). There'd be roaring finishes to songs where we'd be on these incredibly dissonant intervals, and the only way I could find to keep my voice from rounding to the nearest pleasant interval -- a major fourth or fifth -- was to push myself into a state of sheer bloodymindedness, where I wanted the dissonance, loved it, wanted to put as much of it into the world as I could, absolutely gloried in the ugliness of those notes together.

It was a lot of fun, and I was on pitch, so I can't help but wonder if the same would work in the iron/bullet scenario. I also can't help but wonder whether my "find your happy place" method would stand a chance.