This is where I've seen some contradictions from different proponents of non-dualism. Eckhart believes that some animals such as cats and dogs ("'I have lived with several Zen masters -- all of them cats.') are in the natural state, continuously present, suffer, but don't suffer constantly because of the mind like humans.

On the other hand here is a reply I received from David Godman, a student of Papaji and Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj when I asked him what I now realise was a slightly amateurish and superficial question about whether animals with little communication skills are in the natural state because they can't think inside their heads.

"We are all naturally in this state. We just, perversely, pretend that we are not. All animals wrongly identify with a form and claim to occupy it. Liberation ensues when that identification is definitively eradicated. The problem is not one of language. It is the tendency to locate individuality inside a bodily form."

So suffering ends completely for consciousness when it stops falsely locating itself within bodily forms, for humans and all animals.