Mysticism is the pathway of direct experience of the ultimate. The thing about experience is that it is a lot denser, a lot realer than intellectual thought. When you think about things, your thoughts about those things aren’t the same as the things themselves.
For example, you can study the French Revolution for your entire life, and still miss things about it that were front-and-center apparent to those who lived through it. You can read the private diaries of Robespierre, (if they existed) but you won’t know what was going through his head as he was brought to the guillotine.
Similarly, you as a student of the Revolution, will know things about it, and human nature, that no one whose never studied it could possibly grasp.
There are no contradictions in Buddhism, only misunderstandings. The misunderstandings are brought on by the same things that cause misunderstandings in all religions, the necessity of translation. If you actually experience no-self, the sheer wonder of seeing and perceiving things without the feeling of a watcher there that’s doing the seeing and perceiving, then you don’t have to understand the concept. You’ve experienced it.
I can tell you, in words that you can understand, exactly what happens when you become enlightened. I can even point you to a book, written in non-translated English, that will do it for you better than I would. But knowing about it won’t make you enlightened. And the words will just be words to you.
Understanding isn’t knowing. Once you know, then the weird contradictions will make sense. You’ll realize the magic of an undifferentiated being. It will be a part of you, of all of you, that sense of self that is the main character in the movie you’re creating about yourself will be revealed to be a grand illusion, a concoction of the imagination, to be discarded whenever it seems appropriate or fun.