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Welcome to the forum, Cave_Dweller A change to my toenail also applies to myself, the owner of the toenail. So I don't see how something can apply to a thing, but not thereby to the Universe it belongs to. And yet, that's what's being suggested here by Rand: a sum of existents that is not "born", despite being composed of existents that do undergo birth. This oddity, I think, is resolved by the idea of a "base ingredient". Think of something like snow; from snow, various existents can be born: snowmen, snowballs etc. whereas snow existed prior to them. This idea, of a base ingredient, has existed since time immemorial and continues today in incarnations such as "mass-energy", which can only be indirectly observed through the forms it manifests in, be it wood or water or electromagnetic radiation. Why indirectly? Because this X is not a "thing" by itself, but rather what makes things exist and behave the way they do. This kind of X seems to be what Rand had in mind when she wrote: "Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist." implying a separation between "things" as such (which are created, destroyed, created anew, so on and so forth) and the indestructible underlying X. In short, Rand is not exactly reinventing the wheel here. Unfortunately, Objectivists tend to have wildly different ideas about what the Universe even is (see this thread for example), so don't get your hopes up for a "universal" answer.