"Our souls are trapped in a kind of prison on this planet until we gain sufficient knowledge to free ourselves from the cycle of control."

Sounds like a computer game...

I think that in the age of information technology and computer simulations, this is a very nice metaphor for life, although it often comes with much dystopian narrative, i.e. determinism and being controlled by a higher power. While free will may be an illusion, we do not have the deterministic script thus it is all we know.

Jumping out of our conscious loops as you have described will inevitably yield different results, although who is to say that was not determined?

The player of a computer game is as much a part of it as the characters in the game, and perhaps more so, as it is a projection of their whims within the parameters of the game, in our case laws of physics etc.