The arrangement that the Satan places in front of a person is “Let’s make a 50-50 deal: When you’re in the beis medrash you can be successful in ruchniyus, but when you leave, you’ll invest in gashmiyus all the way... after all, one must be successful in gashmiyus as well, by pursuing more ta’avah and more kavod.” In short, the yetzer hara would like us to believe that it’s important to be successful in both arenas—to have the best of both worlds—which, in other words, means to jump back and forth between the worlds.
The peshat is that the yetzer hara says that there should be freedom: I will allow the neshamah to live as it wishes, and I will allow the person to believe in Hashem and serve Hashem... but there are other things in the world as well. Sometimes, we see a person who is utterly animated when he discusses matters of gashmiyus.... This person is unwilling to let go of This World. He wants to be seen as a success here. It could be that he wants to serve Hashem as well, but he won’t give up the matters of This World. This is a klipah, because it’s not true. There is no other world.
This is a world where we do mitzvos, we elevate the matters of This World to kedushah, we invite Hashem to come into all our matters of This World, and we remember that Hashem sent us to this world for a purpose. This is the ultimate purpose of Creation. When we see how difficult it is for a person to nullify This World, we understand that we’re in an existential battle between the secular view of the world and the need to seek only the approval of Hashem, a battle to be counted as “successful” only Above.
