For a long time, this double-helix impressed me as an experience of the Spirit, on one side, and of Scripture, on the other.
Drawing on Sigmund Freud’s disciple Otto Rank, I now also see it as an awareness of our immortality, or spirit, on one hand, and our mortality, or knowledge that we will die, on the other. (Rank argues that our denial of our awareness of our mortality is the central struggle of human lives, rather than sexuality, as his teacher did.)
I could even see the double helix as a stand of Christ as the Light alongside a strand having Jesus as the embodied Christ, or even as Quaker faith alongside Quaker practice.
This double strand appears, too, in the Light/Seed connection. In terms of modern science, if one is energy, the other is matter. If one is Logos, the other is Incarnation. If one is the unity arising in wisdom, the other is the chaos of discovery and exploration.
Rank argues that our greatest insights arise when we span the two strands of awareness, leaping from one to the other and back, and I find that true in our spiritual practice as well, when our abstract faith is tested by everyday challenges.