As a child growing up in a fundamentalist Christian household, I would sometimes try to piece together all the morality and rules I had been taught into one principle that could provide a foundation that would hopefully make sense of all the other "should's" and "shouldn'ts". As an adult, having long abandoned my childhood religion, that quest has remained - a desire to find and express a basic foundation upon which to build and orient my life.
Occasionally, I have gone back to look at what my religion had claimed to be the greatest commandment - to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, soul, mind, and strength - but could no longer relate to the concepts there - commandment, Lord, God.
Independently, one day, I happened upon the concept of "loving life", and it struck a deep chord within me as the answer to my quest, the original motivation for all that we consider valuable. My mind went back to the concept of "loving God", and I started to wonder if what was meant by "God" in that verse might have been closer to what I meant when I used the word "life". "Loving life" is more universally understandable, and does not have the pitfalls that the word "god" creates. I decided to freely retranslate the rest of those verses, specifically Mark 12:19-21, and came out with this:
"The highest principle of all is this: Be mindful, all you living energies, that all of life is connected. And allow the love of life to fill all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your body. And the second principle is really the same thing: know that loving others is the same as loving yourself."
I think there is a disservice we do to all sacred texts: we assume they have some mystery that is not already inside of us. We assume that we are missing something, we are incomplete, and we have to search outside of ourselves to find wholeness, rather than searching deeper within ourselves and our direct experience of life. If we assume that all scripture is saying something that is universal and not new, something we already know and have access to, it gives us a greater freedom to take that internal core knowing as the true representation of the universal principles that religions have struggled to express.
I love your translation of the Great Commandment. It's very similar to what I've always taken it to mean. Some people have done this kind of thing with other passages of Christian scripture (and maybe other scriptures as well, haven't investigated). There are a couple of lovely re-renditions of the Lord's Prayer floating around, and I have a book of re-translations of the Psalms in my stacks somewhere.
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