It's actually a lot more accessible than it seems at first—these ideas are not complex, just abstract. Thinking at a high level of abstraction is very much a skill which requires specific training, but it's a skill worth training and, when you have it, learning things like this becomes much easier.

The same thing is true of programming, by the way: once you start "thinking like a programmer", it becomes much easier to learn a new programming language or to understand some low-level programming concepts. And thinking like a programmer is, in the grand scale of things, not that different from thinking like a mathematician!