In the Bible, eating represents taking in knowledge and the desire for good. Trees represent knowledge and understanding that come from the Lord. So this verse says the people of the Most Ancient Church – "man" or "Adam" – were free to gather the knowledge that flowed to them from the Lord.

This happened in a way that we cannot truly understand now. Because the people of the Most Ancient Church were in a state of love to the Lord, they know instantly, from their affections, what was true. They didn't have to ponder logic and ask questions; they simply knew from their emotional response whether an idea was in accord with love to the Lord.

(Odkazy: Arcana Coelestia 0125)

6622. In talking to spirits about what flows into ideas constituting thought I have said that men cannot by any means believe how countless the details are that an idea holds within it, for men have no conception of thought except as something simple and singular. Thus their judgement of the matter is based on quite external evidence. The spirits to whom I was talking at that time subscribed to the belief that ideas did not have anything inwardly present in them, a belief of which they had become convinced during their lifetime. But to enable them to understand that they perceived countless things as a single whole, I was led to tell them that the movements of millions of motor fibres combine to produce a single action. At the same time all things in the body work together and adjust themselves both collectively and individually to produce that action. Yet for all this that small action is seen as one that is simple and singular, as though it possessed no such complexity. It is similar with the countless things which combine to produce a single spoken word, such as the bending of the lips, and of all the muscles and fibres there; also the movements of the tongue, throat, larynx, trachea, lungs, and diaphragm, together with all their muscles collectively and individually. Since a person discerns the single utterance they make merely as a simple sound without anything more to it, one may see how crude is perception that relies on the senses. What then of perception that relies on sensory evidence regarding ideas constituting thought which exist in a purer world and are accordingly quite remote from the sensory level?