The eating of the fruits of the tree is the establishing of relations with the manifested world, positively as likes and negatively as dislikes, due to the fact that the Jiva is incapable of having a totality of experience as Isvara has, and is limited to particularised experiences of separated objects with which it has varying relations in the different stages of its evolution. The objects, with which the Jiva thus maintains relations, are, in their own capacity, creations of Isvara, but to the observations of the Jiva they bear differing values at different times so that the Jiva has no permanent and definite information of anything in the world, since, as it evolves, its ideas of things also evolve. In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad we are told of the creation of the seven kinds of food or objects which constitute the support of Jivahood, both on earth and in heaven. Food such as rice and wheat, are considered as the general food. Oblations offered in the new moon and full-moon sacrifices are regarded as foods of the celestials by which they sustain themselves as individuals in a higher plane.
Milk is supposed to be the food of animals, which supports the animal nature in others also.
The mind, speech and Prana are the internal foods of the Jiva, by which it retains the network of relations in the world, and without which it cannot exist. Though, in essence, all these are the creations of Isvara, they are converted by the Jiva into its foods, for sustaining itself, through its psychological and sensory functions. The psychic activity of the Jiva referred to here is the Vishayachintana or the idea of objects and its sensory activity is the effort it exercises towards reaching the objects either with the idea of possessing them or avoiding them. So far as pure relationship is concerned, it is immaterial whether it is in the form of likes or dislikes, because both are after all, relations by which the Jiva gets bound in the process of Samsara. Maya acts as the means in the creation of the universe by Isvara, and the mind becomes the means in the experience of the world by the Jiva.