navel-gazern.
/ˈneɪvlɡeɪzə/, U.S. /ˈneɪv(ə)lˌɡeɪzər/ 1. A person who engages in the mystical practice of gazing at his or her navel for a protracted period as a means of attaining a hypnotic or meditative state. Cf. navel-gazing n. 1, omphalopsychic n.
ΚΠ
1854 Belfast News-let. 18 Aug. Spiritualism is not a new religion, being at least as old as the days of..the magi and necromancers of the East and the navel-gazers of India.
1952 L. MacNeice Ten Burnt Offerings 37 Crystal-gazers, navel-gazers.
1996 RES Autumn 49/2 When I speak of the asceticism or training of the eye, I mean much more than the apprenticeship of Zen archers, skeet-shooters, mystical navel-gazers, or the downcast eye of Victorian spinsters.
2. A person who engages in self-indulgent, excessive, or unproductive contemplation of the self or of a single issue; a person who is complacently self-absorbed. Cf. navel-gazing n. 2.
ΘΚΠ
the mind > mental capacity > thought > continued thinking, reflection, contemplation > [noun] > matter for contemplation > contemplation of navel > one who practises
omphaloskepticc1915
1936 Virginia Law Rev. 23 43 Law review writers seem to rank among our most adept navel-gazers... They are sure to be found squabbling earnestly among themselves over the meaning or content of some obscure principle.
1970 Hudson Rev. 23 604 Americans are great navel-gazers, so agonisingly immersed in the problems of their own literary culture that they find it genuinely hard to believe in the existence of any other.
2009 Sunday Times 3 May (News Rev. section) 5/6 Poetry gets a very bad press, largely because it does have some navel gazers in it.
This entry has been updated (OED Third Edition, September 2022).
> as lemmas
navel-gazer
navel-gazer n. a person who indulges in navel-gazing.
Π
1952 L. MacNeice Ten Burnt Offerings 37 Crystal-gazers, navel-gazers.
1990 C. Bellavita How Public Organizations Work 39 A contemplative is not a navel-gazer, isolated from and indifferent to the injustice and suffering that surrounds.
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n.1854as lemmas