For all practical purposes, attaining the human body is the journey’s end, but the sanskaras (impressions) amassed in the travail of gaining this consciousness block man’s view of his eternal Self. All the suffering and struggles man undergoes are to wear out this obstruction, and this involves an interminable process. Man cannot of himself remove the block, but a Perfect Master can do that for him, when his grace is deserved.
The process of getting bound and then unbound is charged with immense significance. The soul gets mixed up with the body and then gets caught up with it.
The soul is like a parrot and the body is like a cage. When the parrot is outside of the cage it is free, but it does not fully appreciate what freedom is. Not having known confinement, it does not recognize being outside of the cage as “freedom.” When it goes through encagement, the agonizing bondage causes it to appreciate what freedom really is. Then, when the parrot is set free again, it truly enjoys its freedom.
The same thing happens to the soul, when, through the grace of the Perfect Master, it is freed from the limiting nightmare in which it believes itself to be nothing but its own encaging body.
-Life At Its Best, p19