How the Emanator operates through the Sefirot — through chains of cause and effect, and by clothing one power in another. How these appear in prophetic vision.
The Sefirot are not the works themselves; they are the thoughts underlying His works — the interconnected order in which His Will operates.
Op. 7–9 dealt with how the Sefirot appear to the prophet. Op. 10 turns to how the Emanator operates through them. The chapter introduces a vocabulary that becomes load-bearing for the rest of the book: chain of development (hishtalshelut) and clothing (halbashah). These two relationships are how the cosmic government actually runs.
The Sefirot are not what He has made; they are the thoughts underlying what He has made. Picture an architect's plan: the building is one thing; the plan that organises the materials, schedules the construction, and specifies the relationships among the parts is something else. The Sefirot are the plan. The cosmos is the building.
Within the plan, two relationships are doing the work. Chain of development: one power evolves into the next. Chesed flows out, Gevurah limits, Tiferet reconciles, and so on down the chain to Malchut at the bottom. The chain is cause and effect in the cosmic register: each Sefirah depends on the one above it for its existence and flow.
Clothing: one power wraps another. Where the chain shows succession, clothing shows containment. A higher power may clothe in a lower one — that is, transmit its influence by becoming the inner reality of the lower's outer form. Clothing is the structural device by which the cosmic government's directives reach the operational levels without losing their identity.
Both relationships will be elaborated extensively in the second half of the book — the chain of development becomes hishtalshelut; the clothing relation becomes hitlabshut. Op. 109 will state them as the two general modes of every Partzuf-pair interrelation. Op. 10 plants both terms here at the structural-foundation stage.
Op. 18 will turn from the Sefirot as thoughts to the letters as executive faculty — completing the picture by showing how thought becomes act. And Op. 109 will formalise Op. 10's two relationships into the general rule that runs through every Partzuf-pair in the second half of the book.