न मे विदुः सुरगणाः प्रभवं न महर्षयः।अहमादिर्हि देवानां महर्षीणां च सर्वशः॥
na me viduḥ sura-gaṇāḥ prabhavaṃ na maharṣayaḥaham ādir hi devānāṃ maharṣīṇāṃ ca sarvaśaḥ
Word by word
The verse says
Neither the gods nor the great sages know my origin. I am the source of the gods and of the great sages, in every way.
In plain words
Even the experts do not know.
The gods do not. The sages who wrote the hymns do not. The people everybody else would ask have not worked it out either.
And the reason given is not that it is hidden. It is that they came after.
Where you've felt this · in creative work
Your grandfather learned carpentry from a man whose own teacher nobody in the family can name. The joints he used were old before either of them was born. Every person in that chain assumed somebody further back had worked it out and written it down, and as far as anyone can tell, nobody ever did.
Going deeper
Coming after something rules out having watched it start, and that simple fact is the whole argument of the verse.
The gods and the sages are, in this picture, products. However old they are, they arrived inside a world that was already running. Asking them about the origin is asking somebody born in the middle of a story to describe its first page.
This is also a quiet piece of honesty about authority. The verse does not say the sages were wrong, or that their hymns are worthless. It says there is one question none of them was in a position to answer, and that it happens to be the first question.
What it offers a reader is a measure of relief about their own confusion. Not understanding where any of this comes from is not a gap in your education. It is the condition of anybody who arrived after the beginning, which is everybody.