All of God’s light is available to every person:
Behold, here is the agency of man, and here is the condemnation of man; because that which was from the beginning is plainly manifest unto them, and they receive not the light. (D&C 93:31)
Why don’t we perceive it, let alone obtain it? Because we don’t trust God sufficiently.
As God reveals more and more of the unknown to your awareness, you must have commensurate trust in God to overcome its effects. Like Peter walking on the water, when his trust was placed in Jesus, he overcame the vast waters beneath him. When he lost that focus on God, he also lost his ability to interact with the water.
As the curtains are pulled back, you will realize to a greater extent than you can imagine that reality is not order with spots of chaos, but a sea of chaos where everything you know is a tiny island of artificial and fleeting order.
There is no limit to the chaos. No matter what you learn, you will always be surprised, and the realization that there is no limit to how awful these new truths can be will and should frighten you. This will shake you to your very foundations until and unless you learn unconditional trust in God.
If you keep yourself fully reconciled to the light God has given you, he will protect you from experiencing more chaos than you are prepared to endure. He will protect you both from too much fire and too much water:
1 But now thus saith the Lord that created thee, O Jacob, and he that formed thee, O Israel, Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine.
2 When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee. (Isaiah 43)
The gospel gives us a framework to deal with the chaos that surrounds us. Faith in God provides adequate strength to endure greater complexity at a faster pace and deeper depth than can be otherwise undertaken. It provides adequate deflation of ego (what you deserve, what you expect, what others owe you) while growing beyond the limits of normality.
Trust in God is the determining factor in how much truth you obtain. Jacob’s ladder is a ladder of trust in God. The more you trust in God, the higher you go.
There is a rung representing every stage of eternal progression. Every righteous desire has associated with it a set of challenges that must be first overcome; ignorance that must be recognized; knowledge that must be obtained; light that must be acquired. Those who obtain salvation (however you define it) do so by conquering all the challenges associated with that level of blessing. They must live that law, which requires a discrete amount of condescension equal to the exaltation that follows.
Here is an eternal truth: God will not force upon anyone here more awareness than was given to Adam and Eve in the garden. God will not force you to climb the ladder. You have to choose to climb.
You will not receive a fullness of knowledge pertaining to our mortal scope unless you ask for it. Even then, it will not come at once, but in packets that grow in intensity as you respond by building your trust in him and reconciling yourself to what is given to you. As you overcome each wave of awareness, he will send you more in the form of something harder. This process is no different for degrees of truth beyond the telestial, but as the degree of trust required grows substantially from one kingdom of glory to the next, the jump takes significantly greater trust, effort, and obedience.
In order to ascend to higher degrees of light, truth, and glory, you must willingly seek and submit to greater pain based only on your trust in God. This was well-understood by some in the past, but it was corrupted over time and resulted in some people inflicting ritual pain on themselves by whipping or other means in an attempt to gain stature with God.
God does not delight in suffering. Suffering outside of the constraints of life does not result in progress or improvement. You need not go in search of pain. If you follow God, it will find you, and it will be far worse than what you can do to yourself. But unlike these artificial ritual beatings, every ounce of it will yield incomparable progress with God.
How does trust in God manifest itself? One way is through your willingness to let go of what you think you have for hope of something better. This covers everything from stopping to minister to another to possessing the radical open-mindedness needed to question a fundamental piece of your perspective.
Another way of measuring your trust in God is to think about how you would react to the ability to relive your past. Most people would like to change some aspect of their past. Few would be willing to relive it. However, if you really trust God, you will see the events of your life as the masterwork of a perfect loving and wise God. If he couldn’t make it better, how could you?
Another metric of your trust in God is whether you have any limitations in your obedience—both in what he does ask you to do, and what he could ask you to do. Immediate belief in anything and everything he teaches you is required. It is also possible:
And it came to pass that I, Nephi, said unto my father: I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded, for I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them. (1 Nephi 3:7)
Abraham was commanded to sacrifice Isaac. If you haven't read that story, or haven't read it recently, consider making it your next reading from the scriptures. Many people call Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac the “Abrahamic sacrifice,” and use it as a type of what God requires from each of us before we can be redeemed from the fall. As important as this experience was, it was not the first time that Abraham was tried (incidentally, tried and tested are not the same thing; it is more correct to think of the Abrahamic sacrifice as the purging of impurities from metal through heat rather than a test you take in school). Abraham was tried as a child when he was assigned to guard his idol-maker father’s wares and chose to destroy them. He was tried when exposed to textual accounts of Shem, Noah, and the fathers and their experiences with God, recognizing his father's religion was inferior and choosing to believe there was something better. He was tried when he was sacrificed by his father, and tried when he had the opportunity to forgive him. He was tried when commanded to leave his home in Ur. He was tried when his father and brother—whom he had rescued through his own merits and mercy—turned away from him. He was tried when his wife was taken by a rich and powerful ruler—twice— for long periods of time without his knowledge of her condition or any likelihood that she would come back to him. He was tried when he took Hagar to wife. He was tried when his marriages were ravaged by the jealousy of Sarah. He was tried when God told him that his beloved son Ishmael would not be his heir. He was tried when Lot, for whom he had sacrificed so much, selfishly chose the better section of land at their parting, not because he cared about the land, but out of sympathy for Lot and what he still lacked in spite of all Abraham's efforts on his behalf. He was tried when he went into battle to rescue Lot. He was tried when he parted ways with Ishmael and Hagar. And finally, he was tried when he was asked to sacrifice Isaac.
The Abrahamic sacrifice isn't one thing. And it isn’t always giving something up. It is a repetitive process where God challenges you to change your paradigm, specifically by changing what you believe. Giving something up or taking something on are only the manifestations of that change in belief. The Abrahamic sacrifice is not a single-point event, it is a process. The goal of that process is to successively increase your trust in God until you are willing to yield completely to him without exception. This is the same as saying that you would do anything he might command, no matter what it is. This is the same as saying there is nothing that you would not do if he commanded it.
God is worthy of your trust. He will never let you down, and without trusting him, your progression will be eternally halted.