Well, let's see . . . .
The definition of auditing in the Tech Dictionary starts off:
1. the application of Scn processes and procedures to someone by a
trained auditor. (BTB 30 Sept 71 IV) 2 . the action of asking a preclear a
question (which he can understand and answer), getting an answer to that
question and acknowledging him for that answer.
The other definitions don't really add much to those two different concepts. Definition 1 is a catch-all one, but it's tautological, basically saying that auditing is what happens in an auditing session. I like it though as it's hard to argue with in broad terms, and covers Objective processes, Dianetics processes, Grades-type processing including Listing & Nulling, as well as Solo Auditing on OT2, OT3, and OT7. It even covers botched sessions where the auditing program is wrong, the auditor is bad, and the pc is protesting the whole thing.
The problem with things like Definition 2 is that while it is correct as far as it goes, how is this different to a mate asking "How's tricks?" in the pub over a beer (assuming he grunts or something in response to your answer)? It does use the word "preclear", which limits it to a Scn context, but that's kinda cheating if you want to get into the nitty-gritty of what IS auditing. If the pub example is too extreme, how about a (non-Scn) counsellor in a session asking a question about something troubling the client, listening to the answer, and showing she understood what was said without telling the client what to think about it? Would that be auditing?
In layman's terms, I think the essence of auditing is (1) find something hot to address, and (2) cool it off. Immediately this gets tricky because of a lack of agreement on how the mind works. It's easy to describe (1) -- the best example is probably what happens at a Scientology Stress Test table. Namely, the [STRIKE]mark[/STRIKE] person is hooked up to an e-meter and the Scn person says, "Think of something stressful" or words to that effect.
Without any conscious thought something would usually spring to mind and simultaneously the needle on the meter would dive off to the right. The Scn person would then point out something, maybe that the meter just showed a thought and isn't that amazing and Scientology can help you so give me your money. What's important here is not the scummy Stress Test table set-up, but the non-analytical triggering of something "hot". It's not auditing because the second part, the cooling off, doesn't usually get done there on the street. It's not really a big deal that it doesn't get cooled off then and there because life triggers stuff all the time, and it tends to cool off all by itself after a while.
There shouldn't be a lot of argument over this first part, (1). However, the second part, "cooling it off," will be contentious. In layman's terms, what just got triggered by the "think of something stressful" command could be considered part of a person's emotional baggage. The more stressful it is, the harder it is to shake it off, to put one's attention on something else. There are two ways of "cooling it off": the first, and most common, is to direct the person's attention onto other things. A simple example is with a baby who gets upset at something trivial, and you direct his attention onto something else and he can rapidly snap out of it. With an adult it might be, "Hey Joe, you look miserable, let's go down the pub and see if we can score with those girls we saw last night!" "Right on, Dick! Hell yeah." The hot item that got triggered still exists to bite the person later on sometime, but for now it has been shunted aside and is dormant.
The second way to "cool it off" is the contentious one. It is to discharge it, to get rid of it, so it's no longer there as part of a person's emotional baggage to get triggered again in the future. This can be addressed in many different ways. The most common is just talking it out, whether out loud to someone or in writing in a journal or on a message board. The action of looking it over and sorting things out in one's mind sufficient to put the thing into coherent (more or less) words seems to be the therapeutic factor here, of varying effectiveness. But there are other less common procedures too: PaulsRobot is full of them, for instance.
Auditing is thus finding something hot to address and cooling it off. Scientology rudiments (there's a PaulsRobot version at
http://paulsrobot3.com/scn/ruds/instructions.htm but it's deliberately written in Scn lingo) are designed to "shunt it aside"; Scn Grades are supposed to gently discharge these hot items bit by bit with the full erasure taking place later on. In contrast, I designed most of PaulsRobot to deliberately trigger hot stuff and immediately discharge (i.e, get rid of) what just got triggered.
I haven't tried to classify the different things labelled "auditing." I think the above is much more valuable.
Paul