No life left in his head.”

So goes the first song on “Whatever It Takes,” the new CD by Bo Lozoff — the one that, if 100,000 copies are sold, will bankroll North Carolina’s first biodiesel refinery.

The upbeat song with a catchy tune spotlights the fact that none of us knows when our time is running out, when our last moment will come, when the “Great Equalizer of the mighty and the small” will deal us our final hand.

“It’s the easiest song I’ve ever written,” Lozoff said from the deck of his home off Nick’s Road in western Orange County. The 70-acre ashram is, among other things, a refuge for recently released convicts.

Lozoff explained that one visitor last year was a man named Carl who was trying to shed some of the 250 pounds he was carrying around. Carl would go running every morning and return beet-red.

“One day I said, ‘You ought to be a little careful, Carl, you could wake up dead one morning,’” Lozoff said. The words resonated. He went to his office a few minutes later and got a phone call from a woman named Judy, whom he could visualize as a debutante, and more words came.

“Judy was a debutante who always got her way; you’ll never ever buy as much as Judy threw away,” the song continues.

“Within an hour and a half, I had the complete song with no revision at all. It’s your user-friendly song about dying,” Lozoff said, smiling.

I told him that the events of the world made me feel as though I had awakened dead that morning. So he launched into a vein that ultimately brought some comfort.

“I live in the world of all time,” Lozoff said. He has studied history, anthropology and religions and sees the current world situation as no surprise. “Jesus said, ‘Where your treasures are, there is where your heart will be.’ We’ve got the treasures we cared about. We have succeeded, but we live in gated communities and a quarter of the world lives in prisons,” he said.

“We have clearly treasured the high-tech side of life more than the human side, so we have created a civilization in which we can phone a friend from 35,000 feet up in an airplane yet need to worry about whether our children may be slain by classmates in school,” he wrote in his book “It’s a Meaningful Life — It Just Takes Practice,” published in 2000. “This is ultimately a question of our priorities — not just national ones but personal ones as well,” he wrote.

Lozoff and his wife, Sita, made some personal choices for their lives more than 30 years ago and continue to live by their commitment. They have received the kind of education few of us know through their ministry to prisoners. In late 1973, they started the Prison-Ashram Project and have been ministering to convicts ever since. They have visited more than 500 prisons, and they have some 30,000 prisoners on a mailing list. They receive at least 500 letters a week from prisoners, and the artwork sent by them hangs on the walls of the Human Kindness Foundation, housed on the property.

Those behind bars and on the outside have learned from the Lozoffs how to live fully and simply with “We’re All Doing Time.” Written in 1985, the manual is in its 14th reprint (it is also available in Spanish, French and Italian). Free copies are sent to prisoners, teaching them how to turn their jail time into a time for renewal — “helping prisoners to use their cells as ashrams, and do their time as ‘prison monks’ rather than convicts,” Lozoff wrote in the book.

The Lozoffs live as anyone else who comes to live at Kindness House. It is communal living, which means meals and work are shared. Each weekday begins with meditations in Meditation Hall, a large upstairs room with windows looking across the fields and woods beyond to the horizon. After a 30-minute silent meditation, there is a 45-minute reading/discussion followed by the work of the day — chopping wood, working in the garden or kitchen, feeding chickens or collecting eggs — doing whatever needs to be done to continue the daily process. There are usually about 12 to 15 people at the ashram, where simple north/south-facing passive solar structures provide shelter.

Living simply and in community helps civilization progress, in the Lozoff view.

“If you have a neighborhood with 20 houses, you probably will find 20 lawnmowers and weed-eaters,” Lozoff said. It’s equipment that only gets used a few hours every year at each house. “We have five vehicles between 15 people; one washer for 12 people — and a dryer that we turn on maybe twice a year.” It’s a trade-off between ecology and economy, but “I believe it will sustain the planet a lot longer,” he said.

As to the biodiesel refinery, he hopes that one day it will be run with ex-convicts in charge. He sees it as a way to have self-reliance from the fossil fuel industry.

Biodiesel fuel is made with vegetable oil waste — the dregs from fast-food restaurants, from the state fair, etc.

“It’s fuel you can grow — and it’s American-grown fuel!”

The ecological impact would be refreshing, Lozoff said. “It’s less toxic than table salt,” he said. “If a tanker filled with biodiesel sank, it would biodegrade quicker than sugar. It’s a win-win situation.”

As to needing a diesel vehicle in order to burn biodiesel, he said that 50 percent of European vehicles use diesel, and although less than 1 percent of Americans’ personal vehicles use diesel, our buses, tractors and trucks run on it. And it’s adaptable.

Lozoff figures that $1 million needs to be raised to move forward with the idea. With that in mind, he has resurrected an old collection of his music and transferred it to CD, and has recorded the new CD.

If you like the voice of Johnny Cash and songs with messages, you’ll enjoy hearing this music — and if you’re a singer, you’ll sing along with it before long. Lozoff sings vocals and plays guitar with great back up from many local residents — Jonathan Byrd, Zan McLeod and Armand Lenchek, guitar; Ben Palmer, bass; Wes Lachot, piano; Aaron Turner, drums; Chris Turner, harmonica; Jim Henderson, saxophone; Bob Vasile, cittern; and vocals by Alexis Cole, Shannon Dancy, Lise Uyanik, Mary Rocap and Cynthia Crossen.

“I’ve been singing all my life,” Lozoff said. “My mother had a nightclub act in the late 1930s with a piano player named Liberace. We knew him as Walter. My mother had a beautiful voice, and she wrote songs.”

Music has been a constant in his life. Now it could become the ticket to realize his next dream. Meet the man and hear his music at a CD release party at 8 p.m. Saturday at the ArtsCenter. The CD costs $15.

Learn more about what makes this local guru tick by looking at the Web site at http://www.humankindness.org./.