The last line of chapter four does something the book does very rarely, which is to locate itself against the religion of its surroundings.
The state religion of the period rested on ancestral sacrifice and on a high god of the ruling house. Cosmological authority ran back through a lineage to a first ancestor, and the ancestor was where explanation stopped. To say that this nameless thing appears to precede the ancestral god is to put something impersonal, unnamed and without will at a point earlier than the lineage.
The claim is made in a single clause and not developed, which is characteristic. The book does not attack the sacrifices, does not deny the gods and does not propose a replacement cult. Chapter sixty says that when the world is approached by way of the way, its ghosts have no power to harm, which is a truce rather than a denial. Chapter thirty-nine lists spirits among the things that attained the one, which places them inside the scheme rather than outside it.
What the position rules out is a personal source. Nothing in the book decides, intends, commands or is addressed, and there is no prayer in it. The way does not choose, and chapter five says explicitly that heaven and earth are not kind. Later Daoist religion developed an enormous pantheon and a liturgy, and it did so on top of a text that gives it nothing to work with in this respect, which is one of the standing puzzles of the tradition's history.