For me Lisp enlightenment was when I realized everything is lambda all the way down (except of course for lists and atoms). I mean we don't really need all the various fancy let, let*, defun expressions to do programming. let, defun are all just abstractions on top of LAMBDA expressions. That means that we don't need some 30 odd keywords to bootstrap a language like we do in C. We can bootstrap a language implementation with some 8 or so special forms and everything else can be defined in terms of those. Isn't that beautiful?