The explanation is as follows: Prior to [God’s] thought to create the souls, His thought encompassed everything, for He needs no tools like we do. [As soon as He thought,] immediately, all of the souls emerged and came into being, as did all of the future worlds that would be created, filled with all of the good, pleasure, and tenderness that He had planned for them [the souls]. [These worlds would] contain the endpoint of the souls’ perfection, which the souls would receive at the end of the repair. [The end of the repair would occur] after the desire to receive would already be completely and perfectly repaired and transformed into a pure desire to give; [at that point,] the form [of the souls] would become identical to that of God, from which all emanates (Zohar, Mishpatim, 51; Zohar Ḥadash, Bereishit, 243).
This is because the divine eternality contains past, present, and future as one. The future is, for Him, like the present, and “time for things to develop” is inapplicable to God. For this reason, the defective desire to receive in its differentiated form [tzura d’peruda] was never present in the Ein Sof. On the contrary, the equation of the forms that will be revealed in the future, at the end of the repair, was immediately present in God’s eternality.
The Sages explained this esoteric idea in Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer 73. “Prior to creation, He was one and His name was one.” The differentiated form of the desire to receive was not revealed at all in the reality of the souls as they emerged from the plan of creation. Rather, they clung to God through the equation of forms, which is the secret of “He and His name are one.” See my Talmud Eser HaSefirot, Part 1.