Sorry, Newb needs help.

Hey, sorry everyone.  
A general question from an experienced musician, but a total Newbie to digital software (especially Adobe Audition).  I've searched around, but haven't been able to change the session sample rate so that I am able to record from an outside source.  Is it automatically set higher (like to 48000Hz?) or lower?  My hardware is set to 44100Hz.  I know this is pretty basic stuff to ya'll, but to anyone who can look back and remember when all this digital stuff seemed like a huge mountain to climb and take pity on a poor analog guy lost in a sea of ones and zeros, your help would be awesome.

Cheers,

Newb2006

If you start a new session that isn't the default one, then you can set the sample rate to whatever your external device supports. If it's set up correctly, the rates will be reported to Audition.

So, when you open the program, you'll get a session that opens at the default rate (which in your case is 44.1k). Now, when you go to File>New Session, you remove the check from 'use default session', and pick the rate you want from the list that's there. When you go to record, this is then the rate that you will be recording at.