Does spiritualist refer to a practitioner of spiritualism, not spirituality?
Hare Krishna.
Question. Why do you use the word spiritualist when it refers to communication with spirits? Answer. No.
Spiritualist doesn't always refer to communication with spirits. There are two related nouns over here from which there is spiritualism and there is spirituality. So spiritualism is usually used to refer to communicating with spirits.
That means it is used to refer to the means sometimes like planchettes and other things by which the word spirits is used over here to refer to the beings who are the beings who have no material body. So they are basically disembodied beings like ghosts and whatever mechanisms are there for communicating with such beings that is called as spiritualism. In contrast with that there is the word spirituality and spirituality refers to the whole field of knowledge which pursues the spiritual side of life which considers the spiritual side as distinct from material side and gives spiritual side prominence.
So spirituality is completely different from spiritualism. Now the problem is within English when we want to form a proper noun to describe the practitioner of spirituality and the practitioner of spiritualism the noun often comes out to be spiritualist. So we could use the word spiritual practitioner or spiritual aspirant but still we could say that spiritual aspirant or spiritual practitioner can also how do we know whether it is referring to spiritualism, the practitioner of spiritualism or the practitioner of spirituality.
So that ambiguity is there and in general within the bhakti theology spiritualism is hardly ever given any importance. We understand that souls are going to various destinations according to their karma and there is not much point in connecting with souls who have already departed from here and have gone somewhere else. So bhakti focuses on spirituality recognizing that we are eternal and that we are connected with the eternal lord who is the supreme spiritual reality and spiritual love for him is the eternal perfection of life.
So usually while discussing bhakti yoga whenever spiritualist is used it refers to the practitioner of spirituality and practically never it refers to, never does it refer to the practitioner of spiritualism.