Light and truth are all around us. Why, then, is it so rare to find someone who possesses a great deal of it?
There are so few people with advanced light and truth because the people who are willing to exert the astronomical effort required to obtain advanced light and truth are rare. Most people settle for the light and truth they casually encounter. This is like collecting only the gold that you happen to find in large nuggets laying on the surface as you walk by on your way to work. Like gold ore, the vast majority of truth is not found lying on the surface in big nuggets, but is found distributed in hard to reach places in small quantities.
How rare is gold? It currently takes up to 100 tons of rock to mine one ounce of gold. That is hard to visualize. To put this into perspective, at this ratio, you would have to dig out enough rock to fill a very large living room floor to ceiling to get a coin roughly the volume of two quarters. Truth is also rare, strictly defined as “not found in dense abundance.” Truth may be all around us, but it requires extraction and processing. Like gold ore, it is encased in and distributed among ideas of far less worth.
Like the effort to acquire gold, the effort required to acquire truth increases exponentially compared to the amount you acquire. The exponential curve looks somewhat like the letter J. It takes much more effort to obtain a little more truth.
With gold mining, there comes a point where the cost to extract the metal exceeds the value of the metal extracted. The holes are too deep and the quantity of gold per ton of rock too low to justify the cost. With light and truth, the only limit is a person's willingness to suffer for others, because the value of light and truth is what you can give to another person. It is one's faith in the eternal worth of a soul’s unlimited potential for progression that determines how deep the mining will go, and what level of suffering is to be endured. Why do so few have great quantities of light? Because so few have true unconditional love for mankind, and because unlimited trust in God is so rare.
To sum up, people who possess vast amounts of light and truth are as rare as the amount of faith required to exert the enormous amount of effort and suffering required to obtain those vast amounts of light and truth. How rare are these people? There is no way of telling. But, if the proportion of gold to non-gold in the earth’s crust is the same as spiritually-advanced people to normal people, there would be about seven of them on the earth today.
Is this an absurd estimate? A spiritually-advanced person would not be living in obscurity, but would be under an incredible weight to do all they could to share their light and truth with all the people they could. Given the internet and other modern conveyances of information, these people would surely be producing materials that would be well-known. How many people do you know who are demonstrating all the fruits of the gospel of Christ and publicly revealing truths that have never been revealed since the foundation of the world? We can also analyze the scriptures for examples of the likelihood of spiritually-advanced people. Although technological limitations made it more difficult to spread information, we see people like Paul and Nephi who were able to preach the gospel face-to-face in every known land within much less than a lifetime. If people like this were teaching, the odds of their teachings making it into scripture are relatively high. And, out of the billions of people who have lived since Adam, how many have their teachings or stories recorded in scripture?
People with vast amounts of truth exist, but they are very rare. These people are reconciled to everything they have, and continue in that path for decades:
And now it came to pass that according to our record, and we know our record to be true, for behold, it was a just man who did keep the record—for he truly did many miracles in the name of Jesus; and there was not any man who could do a miracle in the name of Jesus save he were cleansed every whit from his iniquity— (3 Nephi 8:1)
The purpose of these truth bearers is not to be a light in the place of God. Instead, it is to provide you with more light and truth than you have merited by your efforts, through their suffering and condescension, in hopes that you will repent and take up the duty of mining truth directly from God. Also, they can rocket you ahead in the amount of awareness you have, since life provides us only with a finite amount of time.