So has anybody concocted any solid guesses as to what the concept behind this album is or anything as to the phrase/title "10,000 Days?"

Yes!

They are all over the place.

If I had to boil down the entire CD to one message:

Man's inhumanity to man.

If you read the lyrics and go through each song with that in mind only like 2 or 3 songs don't fit perfectly.

What does it mean to you?

I'm pretty sure you have to be a member of the band to know what the meaning is. It is personal and it can't be explained.

Here's a point about all these interpretations:
All who research, dissect, reorganize, and listen to the album bit by bit trying to create some universal all encompassing message that is supposed to save and/or guide humanity are actually swimming in irony. You're all probably closer than you realize to the religious figures you detest :) The apple doesn't fall far from the tree (ROFL), and I'm having a kick out of some of the elaborations posted here. Keep on Toolin'

(putting more meaning to the words rather than the music is pretty much what all fundementalist religious freaks do. have fun with that)

I read somewhere that maynard's mother was paralyzed for a little over 27 years. approx. 10,000 days. possibly a coincidence but it fits nonetheless.

Union vs Division

I think the album might be a concept album about the 10,000th son of a 10,000th son, but it's only a hunch at this point.

http://expage.com/lukester326

http://expage.com/lukester327

These webpages help explain the Man's inhumanity to man theory in Tool's CD

no - just Division. Union will come later

er, isn't it the seventh son of a seventh son?

lol.

Division. Man straying away from his roots, losing his place in the balance of nature and becoming a plague upon the world.

Also, the album takes an ironic approach to all who claimed to have gotten something out of their work and lyrics, yet still don't think for theirselves.

And it is about the personal perspective on the way the world has shifted. Alot of the songs are personal and general at the same time, which is a pretty sophisticated way of writing. All the references to christianity seem to me like metaphors for any other union. If anything, Wings For Marie/10,000 Days is a kick in the teeth to all religious hypocrites and an ode to his mother at the same time. The angels in Right In Two are a way to write a song about earth from an overlooking perspective. He might as well have used aliens.

If Lateralus was a warning about our abilities and possibilities, our wrong behaviour and the wasting of the gift of life, then 10000 days is a funeral oration at the burial feast of mankind. The resignation, the submission to the things of life, a mournful step of the chosen ones to give up on mankind and join them in life, and live it as it is meant to be lived, as long and as they can, still with some will to globally change things, but with the knowledge that those changes are not likely to happen.

what it was like being a real ghetto ass gangsta growin up on the streeets of LA

I'm fully aware of that. The guy asked what the title means. so i answered since nobody else did. I got your "um ya" right here, buddy.